


Annihilation

by Ajaxthegreat



Series: Annihilation [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, homoeroticism in nature, some eventual scary stuff, which seems to be a call sign of mine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-11
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-01-31 22:40:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 52,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12691647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ajaxthegreat/pseuds/Ajaxthegreat
Summary: He thinks, not for the first time, that the produce aisle of a supermarket is not where he thought he'd watch the world end.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> HI GUYS.  
> have some apocalyptic boning. i mean bonding.

He thinks, not for the first time, that the produce aisle of a supermarket is not where he thought he'd watch the world end.

Truthfully, the world has been ending for months - sickness, blackouts, sickness, rioting, _sickness_ \- but this feels like a turning point. More than anything else.

The storm rumbles deeper than thunder should, cracks the linoleum floor just once, all the way through.

The sky is purple. Not sunset purple, or pollution purple, but the deep, sick purple of a bruise. Levi settles against the wall and digs his fingers into the skin of a mango only half gone bad, looking out the doors at the bruised sky.

This will be it. He knows this in his bones, somehow. The storm will be the thing that pitches the world into that dead, silent, apocalyptic sort of bullshit he had always hated to watch on TV.  

He snorts now, cross legged on the floor of the produce section, surrounded by empty orange carts and half-rotten food.

When the storm finally empties onto the city, Levi hears screaming - or perhaps it is simply the hissing of metal, crumbling under the chemicals in the rain. He gets up, finds a plastic packing bin - impervious to most acids, he remembers - and crawls under it like a hermit crab. He falls asleep to the sound of the rain eating away at the supermarket roof.

When Levi wakes, it is to utter silence.

The roof of the supermarket is gone; whether eaten away by the acid rain hurricane or torn off by the wind, Levi does not know.

It is frightening, how quiet it is. Levi looks for food and water, but nothing has been left untouched by the storm. Cans of precious non-perishables are melted twists of nothing. Even the floor is pockmarked and uneven, full of craters and exposed asphalt.

Levi has no possessions except his clothes and the knife in his pocket, so he leaves, stepping carefully through broken front windows. He takes a deep breath and finds that the air smells better than it has in weeks, in months - as if the Earth has finally managed to break a fever.

Levi steps over the body of something he isn't sure was ever alive and thinks, _Some fever._

He walks.

He walks for days, for weeks. He walks longer.

He's used to being hungry, and finds a surprising amount of edible food hidden away in various caches on his way. A starving childhood has prepared him so well for this environment it's almost uncanny.

The spot where the storm stopped is a clear line in both directions, black, half-eaten rock giving way to actual _grass_ and Levi is so shocked to see such an expanse of green that he stops dead in his tracks, just staring. When he reaches it, he takes off his shoes and sets his bare feet against the soft grass and cries, just this once. It is the only noise he has made in months.

 

He walks through ruined cities, finds corpses in piles, and waits to be taken by a plague no one ever bothered to name, but nothing happens. It is as if the earth has forgotten him, the last of a virus it nearly destroyed itself eradicating.

The Earth is in recovery. The air is sharp and clear, the sky a brilliant, unblemished blue, and when Levi finally crosses into the endless expanse of a national park, he thinks he has never seen anything so alive.

He sleeps under a sky so full of stars it seems impossible, as if the black void of space couldn't possibly contain so much light, and thinks almost _traitorously_ that - perhaps this is better. Perhaps humanity was a virus.

He has lost his voice.

After six months, he sees a family of deer crossing what used to be an interstate and sets off in the same direction they're going. It rains, and Levi shivers in fear just once before the rain is on him. He waits for the flesh to peel off his shoulders, his face, but nothing happens. The water is cool and clean and it smells better than Levi can remember anything ever smelling. He lays in the grass on his back and lets the rain pool in his upturned palms, the hollow of his throat, the dip of his navel. It warms when it touches his skin. For the first time in what feels like years, Levi lets out a breath. His chest eases.

After nearly a year, Levi sees something.

A glint of glass in the distance, off the top of a rusted, overturned water tower. Levi doesn't realize he's running until later, when he's already there. He climbs with numb, freezing hands, and the metal creaks under his weight. When his eyes fall on the man - living, _breathing_ \- he nearly loses his grip and falls off the tower.

The man's name is Erwin, and his eyes on Levi are preternaturally observant - Levi isn't sure if he shifts under the weight of it because of this, or because he hasn't laid eyes on a living person in a year. His voice is in the same sad disrepair as Levi's, and they go long stretches without speaking. Levi's fingers are wrapped so tightly around the knife in his pocket that they're going numb.

He starts setting traps and bringing food to the water tower without really registering it, and the two of them are sharing a camp before Levi realizes what he's done.

Finally, after three days of near-silence, Erwin builds a fire and gestures to it. Levi sits. They cook two rabbits; Levi's catch.

The night creeps up on them, spreads cool and indigo from one tree line to the other, and the fire is warm and safe and bigger than Levi usually builds his. The heat it gives off feels so good Levi has to fight the urge to hide the expression on his face.

Erwin wipes his hands on his pants after he eats and says in a cracked, rumbling voice, "So."

Levi looks up.

"You never told me your name."

Levi looks back down. The meat is charred on one side, and he takes a bite of it so he doesn't have to answer.

Erwin looks at him across the fire and it's frightening, the intensity of his gaze. He seems to let the question go, and for a while nothing passes between them but the fire.

"What did you do before this?" Erwin suddenly asks, as if he can't help himself.

Levi tears out the rabbit's seared throat with his teeth. "Doesn't matter," he says, and his voice is so disused it hardly sounds human.

"He speaks," Erwin mutters under his breath, watching sparks float off the fire and into the air.

"Fuck off."

One corner of Erwin's mouth lifts briefly, then fades away into a look of sheer amazement, as if he cannot believe he's just smiled.

Speaking leaves Levi's throat scraped raw, like he's swallowed crushed glass. Still, he asks, "How are you alive?"

Erwin picks the last of the rabbit out of his teeth. "I was going to ask you the same thing."

Levi shrugs. Erwin's eyes in the light from the fire look translucent, like if Levi leaned closer he'd see right through them. He does lean forward, almost subconsciously, and only the searing heat when he leans too close to the fire pulls him up short.

"I don't know how," Erwin says, looking into the fire with an expression so blank Levi wants to recoil in fear. "I was camping, under a tarp. The rain just rolled off of it."

The Storm is not what Levi means. But Erwin’s expression stops him from pressing it.

Something snaps behind Levi and he whips around, on his feet before the sound has even faded. He squints into the dark, eyes seeing nothing but the ghost of the fire in blue.

"Raccoon," Erwin says, and Levi looks at him over his shoulder. Erwin points.

The animal has a deformity on the whole left half of its body that looks like rot, as if it only half escaped the Storm but survived anyway, and Levi feels a sharp stab of pity before he sits again.

"I don't know where you sleep," Erwin starts, voice hesitant, "but you should sleep here." He doesn't add the _with me_ that rings between them.

Levi considers it. Erwin looks away, looks at his hands - huge, filthy and a little bloody, with long capable fingers Levi feels certain he will dream about - as if to give Levi a chance to decide without the weight of that gaze on him.

Finally, Levi gets up and walks away. Leaves Erwin next to the fire watching him silently, with a sad, resigned sort of look on his face. He finds his camp - the moon is nearly full, and so bright Levi has no trouble - and gathers the tarp he's been sleeping on.

When he shows up at the fire again with the tarp in his hands, the expression on Erwin's face is so unabashedly delighted that Levi has to look away. He spreads the tarp on the ground and settles onto it, back facing the fire.

The ground is hard and cold, but the fire is warm and the air smells invariably of pine needles and rain, and the steady sound of Erwin's breathing is the most welcome thing Levi has heard in recent memory.

Right before he falls asleep, Levi says, "Levi."

There is a long, still silence. Levi feels strangely vulnerable, as if sharing his name has stripped him completely bare. He thinks he will hardly be able to stand hearing Erwin speak it. He cannot see Erwin, but the tone of his voice when he speaks is soft.

"Hello, Levi."

Levi says nothing. He ignores the shiver that slides down his shoulders, squeezes his eyes shut and ignores the way his toes curl.

He dreams of things he hasn't thought of in a year, and wakes sweating and shaking and so hard it _hurts_ , curling into himself. The sky is still dark, so he settles back down and tries to sleep. It's nearly impossible - he can't stop remembering the dream. Erwin's voice, cracking. His fingers. The dip of his throat, the searing expression in his eyes. The way they were both consumed by fire.

Levi turns toward the fire, which has faded to warm, glowing coals. Over the coals he can see Erwin's back, the steady rise and fall of it while he sleeps.

Levi drifts off with the dream still haunting him.   


The days stretch into weeks, and Levi and Erwin become _Levi and Erwin_ without meaning to, without discussing it.

The water tower turns into a base camp, and Levi feels himself becoming something - shifting, from nomadic to sedentary. He thinks, _This is how the virus of humanity started_. He watches Erwin plant the seeds of edible plants he's gathered in a clearing next to the water tower and thinks of the agricultural revolution.

He waits for the Earth to sense this, the cultivation, the life they seem to be building almost as an afterthought. He waits to be wiped off the map.

Nothing happens. Weeks pass. Erwin talks. He tells Levi what he used to do before - Special Forces, and Levi is the least surprised he's ever been about that - while they cook together. His voice evens out over time, stops cracking, and Levi realizes it _thunders_ when he speaks. Levi's bones shake with it.

Still, after all the talking and the cooking and the planting - Levi's grip on his knife does not loosen. He waits, every night, for Erwin to sleep first. And every night he considers killing him before Erwin gets the chance to do the same.

Two months pass at the water tower. Levi can count the times he's spoken on one hand, and yet Erwin seems to just know things: he never approaches Levi without announcing himself, and never from behind. He never so much as makes a move to touch him. He doesn't mention Levi's scars, which he surely noticed, or press him for information, and he always goes to sleep first.

So after weeks, Levi finally feels his grip on the knife in his pocket loosen. He sits across from Erwin in front of the fire while the sun sinks quiet and purple under the trees. Erwin is sharpening a knife on a stone, the sound repetitive and peaceful.

"Before," he says, and Erwin pauses in his motion for a second but doesn't look up, "I, uh."

Erwin starts again with the knife, and the sound lulls Levi into a sort of trance.

"I was a thief," Levi says. "A good one."

Erwin seems to understand - he always seems to understand - that speaking now may break the spell, so he just glances up at Levi's face and then back down at the knife.

"I had, uh." Levi's voice sticks in his throat. He clears it without much success. "I had family. They helped."

Erwin looks openly at him now, and Levi feels his grip on the knife loosen so much that it slips from his fingers. He holds both hands in front of the fire, empty, _naked_ , warming them. Erwin's gaze drops to his empty hands and it shocks Levi down to his core, the intimacy of it.

He very nearly shoves his hands back in his pockets, but the fire is warm on his palms and there's something almost electric in the way Erwin is looking at them. His toes curl viciously inside his boots.

"This, uh, this brat called - called Isabel," Levi says softly, eyes on the fire, "She was our getaway driver." He huffs a soft laugh without realizing it. "She called me big brother, the fuckin' idiot."

Erwin is utterly silent now, all pretense of work abandoned. His eyes are sharp and almost painful on Levi's face. The crickets and bullfrogs are deafening in the face of Erwin's silence, the snap of the fire like a gunshot.

Levi says, "And Farlan -" but his voice cracks and he stops.

Levi looks up and sees an endless expanse of stars, watches a bat hunt insects fleeing the smoke of the fire, and wonders how something so utterly devastating as the Storm and sickness that ended humanity could have brought so much life.

"We can't be the only people who survived," Erwin says, voice quiet, almost a question. Levi is immeasurably grateful that he does not question him about his past.

"Dunno," Levi says. What he means is, _No, we cannot._ "Maybe not." What he means is, _Sooner or later, something will come for us_.

Erwin nods.

That night, he dreams of a forest.

Nothing like the one he is in – the kind that is so thick it looks like night at the bottom, the kind that strangles the life out of everything under it.

Something is moving under the ground. There is no explanation for how he knows this, but he does. The ground is alive in a way that is foreign to him – so are the trees, so is the air. It feels dangerous, insidious and invasive, to take a breath. The floor of the forest smells sweet and clean and he thinks of a Venus fly trap.

Levi stands at the base of a tree, huge and black with roots bigger than he is, and when he takes his pocketknife to the black bark at the side of the tree it bleeds.

The blood is slow and sticky, and it’s so dark that at first Levi thinks it is sap. But he reaches out a hand as if in a trance and touches it and the deep red of it, the smell of it, is unmistakable. Levi knows what blood smells like. He touches the tip of one finger to the tree again and then it’s on his fingers, and then it’s crawling up his hand, his arm, and then there’s _blood_ all over him, he’s covered in it, he can feel it inside his mouth –

"Levi, Levi, wake up-"

Levi is kneeling over someone. He can still feel the blood sliding up his skin of its own accord, like it had a _mind_ , crawling slickly up his neck and into his mouth, and he's kneeling over someone with -

A knife, his knife, his knife is cutting the thin pale skin of Erwin's throat.

Erwin is utterly still, speaking very softly and gently, "Levi, wake up, it's just me, it's just me."

Levi freezes, then moves the knife away too fast, and a bright scarlet drop of blood wells up under Erwin's perfect jaw.

"Fuck," he says, and he's panting and sweating. His heart is hammering from the dream and from the fear and from the fact that he nearly ended the only life he may ever encounter again. "Fuck."

Erwin holds his hands up, still flat on his back. Levi is still kneeling on top of him, one knee on either side of his torso.

Erwin says, "You alright?"

Levi scoffs, hands shaking. "Am _I_ alright?"

"That's what I said."

"I just almost fucking killed you."

Erwin reaches up and touches the cut at his throat and looks at the blood on his fingers. Neither of them have moved; Levi can feel the heat of Erwin's body through his clothes. He's still so close to him.

"I've had worse," Erwin tells him, with what Levi thinks is meant to be a reassuring smile. But it is not a reassuring smile - they're too close, they are breathing too fast, the sky is pitch black and the warm, warm glow of the coals lights up the side of Erwin's face so that the smile becomes -

 _Intimate_ , draws too much attention to Erwin's mouth, and then he makes the mistake of meeting his eyes.

The smile drops off, and Levi is still straddling Erwin's chest. The air is cold, and the difference between the chill at his back and the searing heat of Erwin's body along the insides of his thighs raises the hair at the back of Levi's neck.

Erwin looks at him a long time, silent.

"Levi," he says finally, and his voice is lower than Levi has ever heard it.

It's not a question, then. Erwin understands, too, what is happening between them. He understands and still, he looks. Still he says Levi’s name in that voice.

Suddenly and without any warning whatsoever, Levi feels a surge of pure _fear_ for the easy way Erwin looks straight to the heart of him. His insides freeze with it.

Abruptly, Levi stands and puts the knife back in his pocket, taking several steps away from the fire and standing with his back to Erwin, trying to control his heartbeat.

He sleeps poorly for the rest of the night, until he dreams again.

It’s Erwin, of course it is.

Levi has one hand over his mouth and the other digging vicious, bloody marks into the warm skin of Erwin’s back and he can’t stop making _noise_ –

They’re in a desert. Levi has never set foot in a desert in his life, so his mind does a poor job of creating one. He curls his toes and Erwin fucks him into the cracked, scorched white earth until Levi is gasping for air, until the sun overhead becomes inescapable and he can hardly breathe with the heat of it, until sweat pools in the hollow of Levi’s throat and slips in warm, wet tracks down his back and onto the arid ground.

The sweat evaporates with a hiss immediately, like water in a sizzling pan. The image of Erwin in front of him is hazy with heat, and Levi can still hardly breathe.

Erwin says his name so quietly Levi wonders if it’s only in his mind, then digs his fingers into Levi’s hips bruisingly hard and Levi comes, right then and there, feels the dry air of the desert sucking every bit of the life out of him as he does. Feels himself dying.

When he wakes, it is slowly and easily, with a steady heartbeat and a lazy roll of his shoulders. No lingering fear, no shaking hands. He doesn’t remember the dream.

He sits up and immediately looks for Erwin, who he sees at the top of the overturned water tower. The sun is still low, and the mist of the morning has yet to dissipate, so that Erwin looks like scarcely a ghost - small and far away.

Something seizes Levi's chest and he calls out, "Erwin."

Erwin's head turns. It is silent in the morning air, so Levi's voice carries without him having to raise it. Erwin raises a hand and makes a motion for Levi to join him, and without thinking about it Levi obeys.

His shoes leave prints in the dew of the grass, and some of it kicks up onto the backs of his legs when he walks. The woods are so quiet Levi wonders how they can look so alive - but the leaves on the trees tremble with tiny droplets of water, bright green and soft and sweet-smelling, and the chorus of birds starts up once the sun gets high enough to wake them.

Again, Levi marvels at the sincerity of it. The silence. How _beautiful_ the Earth is in her annihilation of the human race.

He reaches the top of the tower around the same time as the sun to find Erwin sprawled out on his stomach, hair a wild blonde tangle and feet clad only in his wool socks.

Erwin grins at Levi when he steps onto the top of the tower. Levi remembers the feel of him in his dream, the solid presence of him, the safe, warm smell of his skin, and scowls at him.

"Did you sleep at all last night?"

Erwin shakes his head, and Levi feels a stab of guilt - _was he afraid I would kill him if he did -_ before he realizes Erwin is still grinning.

"I had an idea."

Levi raises an eyebrow and resists the urge to rub the sleep from his eyes. The sun is still a soft, early morning orange, and it's doing things to the little hairs sticking out of the top of Erwin's head. Levi finds that the sight of it makes his heart ache.

"An idea?" He asks. Erwin nods again and his eyes are wild with the joy of discovery. They look bluer than Levi has ever seen them.

"To fix this," he says, gesturing to the shell of what was once a radio. The inside of his bag is filled with salvaged parts.

A _radio._

Erwin says, "We can't be all there is," and some dangerous mix of hope and disappointment leaps in Levi's chest.

“You think there are more survivors.”

Erwin nods, fiddling with some small mess of wires and batteries. “And we’re going to find them.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which contact is made, Levi is thirsty, blood gets shed and nature is creepy.

Levi watches Erwin work on the radio in silence for a long time; so long that Erwin eventually looks up at him and asks, "Aren't you bored just watching?"

_Your hands-_

Levi scoffs. "Fell asleep," he lies. "We have enough firewood?"

Erwin doesn't look up from his work. His hands are covered in dirt and grease, and still Levi can't take his eyes off them.

He thinks fleetingly of washing Erwin's hands for him, and blushes so deeply he feels it on the back of his neck.

"We could always use some," Erwin says, eyes still on the radio. Levi tears his eyes off Erwin's hands and starts down the tower.

The forest is thick and shaded, and it smells soft and green and nothing like Levi's dream, which is prickling at the back of his mind uneasily.

It’s right there, and Levi can almost remember it. But he feels nothing more than a strange awareness at the back of his neck, like he’s being watched.

He's set two rabbit traps and gathered a substantial amount of dry wood when he hears it: Erwin's voice, unmistakable, screaming.

He drops the firewood.

He's moving faster than he has in years, then. Perhaps he's never run this fast. It feels good, on some level, to run like this, but the feeling is strangled by the panic in his chest.   
He gets to the clearing just in time to hear Erwin scream again, only this time, this close, it's different: it's _excited_. He's celebrating.

Levi's panic evaporates so quickly it leaves him feeling physically ill.   
"Levi!"

Erwin's voice booms through the clearing from the top of the tower. He's waving his arms.

Levi shakes his head and barks a laugh in relief. He heads back for the tower and Erwin is talking before he's even at the top.

"I did it," he says, voice getting closer even though Levi can't look at him while he's climbing. "I did it, I _did_ it."

Levi gets to the top and the look of ecstatic joy on Erwin's face nearly knocks him over.

"Do you hear this? Listen, listen to this. Come here." Erwin motions for Levi to sit next to him. He's practically vibrating out of his skin. Levi's never seen him like this.

The radio is beeping, intervals of longer and shorter beeps.

“Morse Code," Levi says, though he can't decipher it. an unidentifiable rush of emotion shooting through his chest.

Erwin nods, then says, "It's numbers. The same numbers, over and over again. On all the frequencies I've tried."

Levi sits, if only to be marginally closer to the magnetic pull of Erwin's energy.

He doesn't know shit about this shit.

"I don't know shit about this shit."

Erwin snorts, still fiddling.

"How many digits is the number?" Levi asks.

"Four."

"How many digits are the frequency numbers?"

Erwin stops.

"It's a specific _frequency_ request," he says under his breath, then turns to Levi. His eyes are wide and his face is so close and his cheeks are flushed with excitement.

"Levi," he breathes, and he smells like clean water and the ocean and the trees.

He could reach out and touch him, right now. He could do it so easily. Erwin would probably let him.

Something crackles between them like lightning and Levi amends that thought.

Erwin would _definitely_ let him.

It would be that easy. To just - reach out and take it. Erwin's eyes are the color of the sky, manic with joy. Reckless.

Levi turns his head and scratches the back of his neck. "Maybe not," he murmurs. "Could be wrong."

Erwin's already shaking his head, tuning into the frequency being broadcast.

"You're not."

Ten minutes later they finally get a clear signal on the broadcast frequency, white noise giving way to high-pitched squealing and then-

Levi's entire stomach disappears.

"-hear us, please respond. This is a call for survivors."

It's a voice.

A _voice_.

Erwin's hands are shaking. He looks over at Levi, both of them sitting on the water tower with looks of astonishment on their faces, and the voice speaks again.

It says something in German, then something in Spanish, then something in Chinese. A few more languages Levi doesn't understand, then French. Levi understands that one.

"Repeat, this is a call for survivors. If anyone can hear us, please respond. This is a call for survivors."

It's a kid, or it sounds like one. Can't be older than twenty. Levi feels like he needs to sit down, despite the fact that he's already sitting. The kid cycles back to English and repeats himself again. It must be a recording. It must be.

Erwin tears the back off the radio again, and his hands are shaking so hard the parts bang into each other.

"Two-way, two-way, two-way," he's muttering to himself, over and over again.

Levi's brain is nothing but white noise. The sight of Erwin's hands shaking has shut everything down. He says nothing.

Erwin's disbelieving excitement shifts to frustration in an eye blink, and the cool level headedness Levi has always observed in him cracks. His hands won't stop shaking, and he can't keep them steady enough to move any of the tiny pieces inside the radio.

" _Shit_."

He slams the radio down and curses at the sky, as if the Earth will provide him answers.

Levi moves, finally. He takes the instruments out of Erwin's hands, picks up the radio and settles it into his lap.

"Tell me," he says lowly.

Erwin looks at him, expression sharp and almost angry, and Levi feels himself flush under his shirt, in his chest.

"Your hands are shaking," Levi says, and Erwin's expression clears. "Mine aren't. Walk me through it."

Erwin nods, adapting faster than Levi expects. "We need to get this here-" he points- "to transmit a signal."

"This isn't a two-way radio."

"No," Erwin agrees. "So we won't be able to speak. But we can use Morse, and we can hear them talking to us."

Levi nods.

"There are two wires attached to this transmitter," he points again, "they're _small_. I haven't done anything so delicate in quite some time. I guess it's a skill that one can lose." His voice is bitterly angry.

"I see 'em," Levi says quietly, focusing.

"They need to be stripped and then wired together." Erwin's voice is suddenly much closer, right in Levi's ear, and if he didn't have such steady hands he would have dropped everything.

"Pass me the-"

The wire strippers are in Levi's hand before he finishes his sentence.

He can feel Erwin's body heat behind him, just over his shoulder, closer than they've ever been before, and his heartbeat feels like a rabbit's in his chest.

"You have steady hands," Erwin murmurs, appreciative. So close. The tone of his voice raises the hairs on the back of Levi's neck.

Levi doesn't speak until the wires are stripped.

"Been picking pockets and locks since I was six."

Erwin is quiet for a moment, and his joy and frustration the past few hours have been so wide open that Levi decides to add, "Started on safes when I was twelve; your hands can't shake on those."

"No," Erwin whispers, "I imagine not."

"I need something to solder these -"

Again, Erwin hands him something before he speaks. It's a needle, long and cherry red with heat on one end, with a rubber grip.

Levi starts to join the wires before the needle cools and speaks while he works, "Where'd you get this?"

"Just made it. Be careful when you back up, I just started a fire behind you."

Levi doesn't look. His eyes don't move from his task. Everything seems frozen, paused so they can accomplish this. He manages to connect the wires, small as they are.

"Extraordinary," Erwin says under his breath.

Levi blushes, hopes Erwin doesn't notice. They're so close he's afraid Erwin will feel it.

“Alright.” Erwin’s voice is too close, it’s too close, Levi can feel it on the back of his neck, on his ear, it’s _too close_ -

Erwin’s handing him something else, something small and metal that he doesn’t recognize.

“Put this right _there_.” He points. Levi does as he’s told and Erwin gets closer, shifts so his whole chest is touching Levi’s back and says, “No, no, wait.”

Levi freezes for a number of reasons.

Erwin’s hand closes on Levi’s wrist briefly, as if to stop him, then lets go. Levi isn’t sure which is worse.

“Sorry,” Erwin says, so low and so close that the warmth of his breath on the shell of Levi’s ear raises goose bumps on his arms. “Just a bit to the left. See the blue piece? Just under there. Right there. Yes, perfect.”

_Right there yes perfect_ –

Levi swallows. His heart is beating so fast he wonders if Erwin can hear it.

“Okay, let’s try that.”

Levi closes the back of the radio and turns it on, gives it back to Erwin. Erwin fiddles with it for a moment, finds the kid’s frequency again, and uses the antenna to tap something in Morse.

He waits, then does it again.

Levi holds his breath.

Again. Erwin sends the message over and over for fifteen minutes, for twenty minutes. For nearly an hour. Still, Levi holds his breath.

He doesn’t want to ask the question – _what if it’s not transmitting -_ but it threatens to spill out of his mouth anyway. Erwin looks up at him.

Levi says, “What if it’s –”

There’s a loud crackle on the other side of the radio and the kid’s broadcast recording stops. Levi looks sharply at Erwin, heart hammering. Erwin taps out the message again, eyes on Levi’s. Levi can see the moment Erwin’s pupils dilate.

The crackling gives way to an explosion of white noise and then, finally, more like a breath of air than Levi has ever felt:

“Is this – _fuck –_ shit, we hear you, we hear you transmitting, fuck, um. Where, um. Where are you?”

It’s a different voice than the recording, confused and flustered but still, unmistakably -

Hope. Quite possibly humanity’s last.

Erwin laughs desperately; one loud whoop that echoes off the trees, then puts down the radio and pulls Levi to him with both hands fisted in the front of Levi’s shirt and kisses him.

Levi freezes.

Erwin’s body is warm and he smells like grass and he _tastes_ like –

He pulls away before Levi can really react, with an almost sheepish expression, hands still in Levi’s shirt. His eyes are wild, pupils wide. He licks his lips and looks away, then back at Levi again. Levi feels like a slight breeze will shatter him into a million pieces.

“Sorry,” Erwin says quietly. “That was inappropriate.”

Levi shakes his head. He doesn’t speak, afraid that if he did he would say something foolish like _please please touch me again –_

Erwin picks up the radio again, hands shaking. He taps something out, then says to Levi in a low voice, “I told him we speak English and that we’re somewhere east of the city.”

_That’s it_ , Levi thinks. _We’re not going to discuss it._

It was the sort of ecstatic excitement that seizes a person once, maybe twice in their lives. He understands why Erwin did it. But he can’t get the taste of him off his mouth.

He nods instead, still unable to find his voice.

Erwin transmits the message one more time. The second voice, the confused one, comes back, crackling like he’s juggling the microphone.

“Okay, sorry, um, it took me a while to, like, figure out what you said.” The voice sighs, then says quietly as if to himself, “Fuck, Armin is way better at this shit, why did this happen today – Okay, okay. I need something to call you. What do I call you?”

A giddy sort of joy takes up residence in Levi’s chest as the voice stumbles through deciphering Erwin’s messages. There’s something so – normal – about a college kid failing so spectacularly at being reassuring in a situation like this. Levi almost smiles.

Erwin taps something else, twice, eyes on the radio. He seems to be carefully avoiding looking Levi in the eye. 

Levi thinks his desperation to be touched must have shown on his face when Erwin kissed him, otherwise he wouldn’t be acting like this.

The voice comes back and says, “Okay, I have E, R, W, I, N. Erwin? Is that right?”

Erwin looks up at Levi and huffs a laugh, and Levi can’t help saying, “Kid’s a fuckin’ idiot.”

“Okay. Right, um. I don’t – I don’t really know what – uh, sorry, Erwin, this sort of thing isn’t exactly my forte, um. Lemme – lemme go see – I’ll be right back. I swear, okay? I swear I’ll be right back.”

Erwin taps what Levi has learned is _yes_ into the antenna.

They sit there, on the tower, still in stunned disbelief. Levi settles down into a more comfortable position and faces Erwin, and Erwin seems to understand that this is Levi’s way of saying he’s forgetting what happened between them.

Erwin sits cross-legged and says, “I suppose I should teach you some Morse Code, just in case.”

Levi furrows his eyebrows. “In case what?”

“In case I die.”

Levi feels like he’s falling off the tower. He looks away, over the tops of the endless expanse of trees. “Don’t, then.”

Erwin laughs. “I don’t plan to.”

“Good.”

“Good,” Erwin echoes, then looks at Levi a long time. He licks at his lips again, almost absently, and Levi feels a curl of warmth in the pit of his stomach at the sight of it. Maybe it was more than –

“Okay, uh, Erwin?”

They turn their attention back to the radio. The kid is back, the kid Levi has named in his head as Our Last Stupid Hope.

“I’m gonna, uh, hand the radio over to the guy who built it, okay? He’s good at this shit. I just, uh. Didn’t want you to think I’d left you.”

A warm, almost affectionate smile curls at the corners of Erwin’s mouth. He looks over at Levi.

Levi says, “I learn fast. Just say what you’re tapping aloud and I’ll pick it up. Eventually.”

Erwin’s smile widens, and there’s such open affection in it that Levi finds himself turning away again, blushing warm and red across the back of his neck.

Erwin taps, then translates aloud, "Thank you," with a wink at Levi.

Levi's fingers tingle. His mouth is dry. He isn't sure whether it's the fact that there are living human beings on the same continent as him, or the fact that Erwin's face has never housed such an expression before. He looks wild, open, utterly brilliant with discovery and hope.

A voice, the voice from the first transmission, higher than the second one, comes through the radio.

"Erwin, this is Control, do you read me?"

Erwin nods, taps out yes. Then, almost as an afterthought, says, "Yes," in Levi's direction. Levi snorts.

"Yeah, I got that," he says.

Much faster than Hope answered, Control's voice comes back.

"Roger that, Erwin. Fuck, it's good to hear from somebody. Are you alone?"

Erwin taps out "No," and Control answers almost immediately.

"How many in your party?"

Erwin taps something that Levi assumes means _two_ , then holds up two fingers to Levi.

His fingers are so long and capable-looking and it's really not the time and Levi feels himself flush under his shirt again.

"Roger that, two in your party. Now, listen, Erwin -" a scuffle sounds over the radio, like several people moving at once, and a few stage whispers overlap so that Levi gets the impression of several children fighting amongst themselves.

"Erwin," Control's voice says, slightly winded, "Guys, _shut up_ , I'm telling them - Erwin, we've been having some, uh. Issues with security lately -"

_Issues with security?_ Something twists painfully in Levi's stomach, panic and shock at once. He looks sharply at Erwin, watches the moment Erwin's pupils shrink.

Erwin taps, interrupting the broadcast, and whispers, "Survivors?" in a low, buzzing voice. Levi feels Erwin's concern like a physical thing.

Control laughs drily, devoid of humor. He's much faster on the uptake than Hope.

"You could say that, I guess. Sort of. Watch your backs, both of you."

Erwin nods, then seems to shake himself, as if remembering Control can't see him.

"Yes," he says, quiet. He taps it out.

Levi's heart is beating too fast.

"So since we've been having issues with security, I'm going to send you to a location with a closed frequency. Then we can talk on a secure line. Sound good?"

"Smart," Erwin comments, eyes flickering over to Levi. He nods, types out _Yes_ again.

"There's a military base about 60 miles outside the city. Any chance you know it?"

Erwin grins, wide and almost feral, something savage in his eyes that Levi has never seen before. It makes Levi's hands shake and he can feel the hot flush of want over his stomach.

Erwin murmurs, "And warfare as a living pays off again," with that devastatingly dark expression still on his face. Levi feels like he shouldn't be so - so _affected_ by the violence in Erwin's expression, but he can't help it. Very suddenly and so strongly he can hardly breathe, he wants that violence.

He digs his nails into his palm and focuses back on the radio.

"He didn't say which direction," Erwin says, oblivious to the way Levi is breathless and blushing just watching his face. "Smart kid."

He taps out _Yes_.

Control breathes a sigh of relief. "Thank fuck, thank fuck for you, Erwin. When you get there, find a secure line and call this frequency, okay? I'll walk you through the rest."

Erwin taps something long, something Levi doesn't get at all. Under his breath, Erwin murmurs to Levi, "I said, 'It's good to know a brain survived.'"

Control laughs, and his voice is so high and soft and he sounds _so_ young, and Levi cannot believe they are putting their faith in a man who is still practically a child.

"At least two brains, I think, Erwin," Control says. "I'll give you a month to get there and signal us. Sound good?"

Erwin taps, whispers in Levi's direction, "Two weeks."

"Don't get ahead of yourself," Control says, and despite how young he sounds Levi can't help but trust him. "Be _careful_. Control out."

Erwin turns off the radio, then looks at Levi.

Levi doesn't know what to say, so he settles on, "Holy motherfucking shitchrist."

Erwin laughs, actually laughs, and Levi is getting whiplash from the wild, open oscillation of Erwin's emotions, like an uncaged bird.

"Shitchrist," Erwin repeats, wiping his eyes. He stands and holds out a hand to Levi to help him up. Levi takes it without thinking, does not even consider that a year ago he would have sooner cut his arm off than accept such a small gesture.

"The Base is west of the city," Erwin says, dusting off his pants and starting to climb down. "It's probably around 50 or so miles from here." He points over the thick carpet of trees. "That way."

Levi climbs down after him, mildly irritated at how slow he moves. Levi's always done things too fast.

"I wanna check my traps first," Levi says as their feet touch the ground. "Then we can go."

Erwin nods, starts off toward their camp to gather their things.

Levi heads off into the woods, something like melancholy eating away at his chest. The woods are safe, beautiful, quiet. They smell green and soft, and Levi sometimes finds himself whispering to the trees.

He'll miss these woods, he thinks, and lets the worry sink in as he considers the security risks Control mentioned.

Other survivors. Hostile ones.

Levi reaches his furthest trap and finds -

His heart stops.

The rabbit's body is gone, the trap wet with blood, but it's head hangs from the tree like an ornament. It's been tied there, carefully. Deliberately.

Some primal instinct screams in Levi's chest, _Get out of the woods._

It's so strong he can hardly feel his feet, moving too fast over the bed of dead leaves and dirt.

Something is wrong.

He's never moved this fast. He can smell the floor of the forest in his lungs.

_Get out of the woods._

He's never felt anything like this, like something dormant and animal in the back of his brain is suddenly awake, screaming.

He vaults over a dead tree, sunlight lighting little bugs and motes of dust over it, and it's warm when he puts his hand over it.

Incongruous. That's the word he's looking for. That's what this fear is. The woods are quiet and beautiful and perfect, peaceful and everything Levi has ever wanted, and yet -

_Get out get out get out_ -

All his hair is standing on end. It feels, absurdly, like the woods are _warning_ him-

- _out Levi get out get out-_

He's never run so fast in his life and he's hardly even winded. He reaches the tower in minutes, finds Erwin just finishing packing their things, stops right in front of him and grabs the bag out of his hands. Erwin's demeanor changes instantly.

"What is it?"

"We have to go." Levi looks around them, feeling every inch the cornered animal he's so sure he is. "Now."

Erwin nods and they move, quickly but quietly, in the general cardinal direction of the Base. They get to the edge of the woods and Levi hesitates.

"What?" Erwin asks, eyebrows pulling down.

"You don't feel that?"

Erwin looks around. "Feel what?"

Levi looks up at the trees. His whole body rebels against the idea of setting foot in there again, as if he's stepping into enemy territory.

"It's.... something's not right," he finishes, eyes still on the dark woods. He holds up his hands, mildly surprised to find his knife is already in his hand. Erwin digs around in his pack and pulls out something small and metal.

"Is that a fucking _gun_?" Levi asks, distracted and angry.

Erwin shoots him an apologetic look.

"You never thought it might be a good idea to mention you're carrying that?"

"Lev-"

Something crashes in the forest, like a tree falling over. Several branches snap at once. Levi's whole body is vibrating. Erwin cocks the gun and points it into the darkness.

_Get out of the woods_ , Levi's instincts scream at him, and yet when Erwin takes a careful sidestep into the trees Levi follows him without question.

Erwin steps on a twig and it snaps, loud like a gunshot, and he winces. The afternoon light filters thickly through the trees, and Levi can't help the shiver that runs up the back of his neck as he watches the shadows.

Levi's steps are utterly silent. Erwin actually turns around to check that he's still there, his own feet making quiet little crunch noises through the leaves. He gives Levi a look, eyes dropping to Levi's feet, but another branch snaps ahead of them and his attention goes with it.

He gestures at Levi and then looks at Levi's feet and jerks his head. What he means is, _You're quieter and faster, go around._

When did he learn to read Erwin so well?

Erwin holds the gun up, cocked, steady. _I'll cover you_.

Levi holds the knife, warm and familiar against his palm, and does as Erwin says. He makes a wide arc to the side, coming up around the sound from the back.

He can see Erwin's gun trained on the sound through the trees, but he's too far away. There's no way he can make a shot so far.

Another branch breaking.

Levi's skin crawls with the sense of _wrongness_ pervading the air, like the way a sick person smells. He can feel it poisoning the woods. He shivers.

_Get out of the_ -

He shakes it off, the instinct to run. They have no choice.

The knife is still steady in his hand, but he can't help the sweat that runs down the back of his neck. He takes another step, and something comes into view -

Levi's chest freezes.

It's a person.

He's never seen anything like this.

The hair is gone, the scalp bloody in places like they've torn it out. They're about the same height as Levi, turning in confused circles like they've forgotten something. There is a radio transmitter in their bloody hands.

Levi hears Erwin take a few steps closer, but he can't seem to move himself.   
Erwin's voice is low when he says, "Levi, are you alright?"

Levi nods. The hand on the knife comes up to point at the person just - just standing in the middle of the woods like a lost child.

Erwin narrows his eyes and says, "Who are you?"

They don't respond. The radio transmitter beeps. Erwin's eyes fall to it.

"You tracked us here. Why?"

They look up, fix Erwin with a stare that looks feral and confused at once, not entirely lucid. They speak in a rough, cut-up voice, as if speaking is a great effort:

"I - I don't - my legs hurt -"

They walk toward Erwin with lurching, horrible steps that make Levi feel ill. The side of their mouth bleeds, slow and thick.

Something rolls out of the backpack on the ground then, kicked by their strange visitor's clumsy foot.  

A hand.

A human hand, clearly chewed at the wrist.

Levi has barely registered it before Erwin shoots the cannibal between the eyes. They go down immediately.

Levi looks at Erwin and breathes.

"Thanks."

"Anytime," Erwin says, eyes on the body.

Levi feels strangely winded, as if he’s run a great distance. He feels dizzy. He turns to Erwin and the sight of him levels out Levi’s panic. He breathes.

"What was - what was wrong with this person?"

Erwin crouches. "I can't say for sure. But the confusion, the difficulty remembering, the difficulty walking and speaking. Those are symptoms of a prion disease."

Levi's eyebrows lift. "What, like Mad Cow?"

Erwin looks up at him and almost smiles. "Exactly."

His smile drops off and he and Levi look at the severed hand, clear teeth marks visible on the wrist.

"Prion diseases are fairly common in cannibals," Erwin says, and Levi gets a chill down to the base of his spine.

He thinks of the transmitter the cannibal was holding, still clutched tightly in a dead hand. It has stopped beeping.

"Cannibals. Plural."

Erwin nods, gets up and steps over the body.

"Someone sent that person here. You saw the transmitter. We're lucky the disease was so advanced by the time they reached us."

Levi goes to the body and roots around in its pockets, looks in the backpack for anything they can use. The hand is still there, cold and awful. Levi ignores it. He pulls out something long and hard, with a handle and a hand-guard -

A sword.

Levi feels himself smile viciously, unsheaths the sword to inspect it. It is light, silver, frighteningly sharp.

_His_.

Erwin's walking in the direction of the Base again, as if nothing has happened. Levi follows him.

The woods are quiet, oblivious to the bloodshed on the ground. The sun filters lazily through the trees, and the leaves at the top are a brilliant green when Levi squints at them.

But he can't shake that bone-deep panic, that primal, instinctual fear.

_Get out of_ -

"Cannibals," Levi repeats, because of all the things that have happened, this seems the strangest. "Fuck."

Erwin nods again. His gun is still out.

"Base is a few days out," he says. His hand is shaking on the gun, now. As if he's finally allowing his body to be afraid.   
Levi puts the sword at his hip - it feels good there.

"We've got some news for Control, huh?"

Erwin shudders. "Yes."

Something chitters up a tree next to Levi and he starts violently, so on edge he feels his body vibrating.

_Get out of the woods._

"We better hurry."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hoooo boy we got cannibals yall.  
> as always, i would be literally nothing without @ellabesmirched.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked. In the grip of it pain or pleasure doesn't matter. You think what will they do, what new power will they acquire if they see me naked like this. If they see you feeling."_  
>  -Anne Carson, Red Doc

The first week is uneventful, if colder than expected. Levi has no idea what month it is, but the air at night is now so cold he finds himself inching closer to where Erwin sleeps by the fire, if only to use his body to block some of the wind. 

Sometimes he lays on the ground at night and pictures himself getting up and climbing on top of Erwin just like that - silent, no preamble - and he has to curl his hands into fists to keep from touching himself at the thought of it. Of what Erwin would do. 

They make good time, cover more ground than Levi expects, so that in a week they’re out of the woods and following a one lane road through mostly open air. It doesn’t help the wind.    
The first day of the second week, they find a skeleton. 

It’s nothing new, of course, except that they’ve only found them in cities before, and this one is - small. 

Too small. 

Levi’s stomach turns and he looks away almost instantly, eyes fixed on the sky. He tries desperately not to think about it. 

Erwin is silent behind him, though he curses softly and Levi can hear him crouch to where the body is curled in the grass, almost entirely bones by now. He mutters something, perhaps a prayer, and then stands again. 

They don’t speak again until that night. 

They continue walking for a few hours but stop early; the sight of a child’s bones has sapped all the energy from them. 

Levi finds himself staring mindlessly into the fire, warming his numb hands and absently cleaning his sword, when Erwin speaks. He’s clearly still thinking about the skeleton.

“Did you have-”

“No,” Levi says sharply, though he thinks of Isabel. More a sister than a child. “No.” Then, an afterthought: “You?” 

Erwin shakes his head. He looks so tired. “No, never had - occasion.” 

What a strange thing to say. Levi looks up and meets his eyes, startled when he finds clear, exhausted pain there. The carefully maintained distance between them has been shrinking for days, for weeks if Levi’s being honest with himself. 

“My unit was -” Erwin stops, voice halting, quiet. “They were the closest I ever came. To having children.” 

On the word  _ children _ Erwin’s voice cracks, and Levi has never heard this from him before. He wants to touch Erwin’s face, but tells himself it’s an aberrant thought, similar to wanting to throw oneself out of a moving car. 

Levi focuses on another part of his sentence to stop himself: “ _ Your _ unit?”

“Yes.”

“So you were a -”

“Commander. Yes.”

Of course. Of course he was. Levi turns back to his sword, finishes cleaning it. Wordlessly, Erwin hands him something: a smooth, cool sharpening stone. 

The sound is just as soothing as when Erwin had used it last, almost hypnotic. Levi feels himself relaxing, thoughts of the small skeleton finally fading to the back of his mind, where he hides all terrible dead things. 

“Better?” Erwin asks, as if he’s made Levi a cup of tea. Levi nods without looking up, focus narrowing to the sword, and the glint of the fire off it, and the soft, silver sound it makes against the stone. It hums quietly for a fraction of a second every time. 

“May I ask you a question, Levi?” 

_ Levi _ . He rarely uses his name, now. When he does it lights up the inside of Levi’s chest, burns low in his stomach like some sort of secret. It feels personal, intimate, as if Erwin is speaking directly into his ear. Levi’s toes curl. 

He shrugs without responding. 

“What did you steal? Before?”

Levi doesn’t stop sharpening his sword, slow and careful. He will have to stop soon or it will get too thin too quickly. 

He’s never told anyone this before. 

“Guns, at first.” He looks up briefly to see a look of surprise flicker across Erwin’s face. “Military grade stuff. Other equipment, too.” 

“You sold it?” Erwin sounds benignly curious for someone who’s just discovered his traveling companion used to be an arms dealer.

Levi nods. “For a while. The money was good.” He allows himself a tight, vicious smile at the understatement. He remembered Farlan buying a house with that money. “Dangerous as shit, though.” 

“I’d imagine.” 

Levi lapses into silence after that, remembering things he doesn’t exactly want to remember but doesn’t exactly  _ not _ want to remember, either. 

“What about after that?” Erwin says gently, as if he’s speaking to the traumatized victim of a crime.  _ Can you tell me what happened next? _

“Art,” Levi says, short.

Erwin makes an audible noise of surprise, then clears his throat. 

The fire crackles warmly between them, and Levi finally stops sharpening his sword. He touches the edge gently with his thumb, revels in how beautifully sharp it is. 

“I didn’t expect that,” Erwin admits. Levi shrugs again. 

“The security systems were good. I had a - “ he pauses. He’s never spoken about himself for this long. A few sentences and he feels himself reeling, off-balance, unnaturally exposed, as if he’s just peeled off his skin.

Erwin’s eyes on him are quiet but not judgmental, curious but not demanding, sharp but not cruel. 

So he continues. “I had a thing for. Challenges. Liked breaking good security, you know. Cracking good safes and shit.” 

Erwin’s lips curl at that. “Doesn’t surprise me.” 

Levi feels cold, suddenly. Naked. Sharply, he asks, “Are we done?” 

Erwin’s eyebrows come together. “Levi, you never have to speak if you don’t want to.” 

“Yeah, I know I -“ He’s freezing. He shivers. “I fucking know that.” 

“Okay. Well then, if you don’t want to - I mean, yes, we’re - done.” 

“Right. I’m going to sleep.” 

Erwin’s hair is so much longer than it was when Levi met him. “Goodnight,” he says, still in that soft, open voice. 

Levi doesn’t respond except to put his sword away. He keeps it within reach when he settles onto the ground by the fire. 

He dreams, again, the same dream he failed to remember so many months before. 

A dark wood, and one towering, frightening tree. The roots twist above the ground, like a city surrounding the trunk. The bark is black as pitch, even under the painfully brilliant light of the moon. 

When he cuts into the bark with his pocket knife, blood oozes out of it like it’s alive. Like it’s an animal. But this time, the blood does not try to consume him. It doesn’t crawl up his arms and into his mouth. This time, he looks up. Into the branches. 

On the lowest branch is the decapitated rabbit head from before, and higher up - 

His own, his own head, and he feels a shock through his veins like freezing water and - and Erwin’s - 

The sight of Erwin’s head like that, face twisted and frozen and gut-wrenchingly dead, has Levi falling to his knees.

_ They’re coming.  _

He wakes with a gasp, covered in sweat, shaking and shivering in the middle of the night. The fire is low, so Levi throws a few more logs onto it and stokes it with a stick. He feels ill. 

Erwin’s sleeping a few feet away, but Levi suddenly needs to see his face, unharmed, attached to his body. His heart is beating so fast it hurts his chest.

He gets up, walks around to where he can see him, tells himself he’s gathering more firewood. They’ll freeze if the fire goes out.

As soon as he can see Erwin’s face the knot in his chest eases, but only just. He’s too still, and even though Levi can see the steady rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, part of him is still so sure he’s dead.

He crouches, then says in a hoarse, vulnerable voice, “Hey.”

Erwin scrunches up his face a little, but doesn’t wake. Levi has never spoken his name before, so when he does it hits him with the force of a train.

“Erwin.”

It hurts _ ,  _ speaking his name like that. Levi can feel it crawling out of his ribcage, the intimacy, the fucking  _ intimacy _ of it.  

Erwin groans softly and Levi files the sound away for later, when he’s curled in on himself in the dark pretending not to think about such things. Erwin’s eyes flicker open and Levi’s shocked at the color of them, like he always is.

“Levi? Are you alright?”

Levi feels foolish. Immediately, viscerally. He shouldn’t have done this. He shouldn’t have woken him. He certainly shouldn’t have spoken his name like that – so  _ open _ , so familiar.

“Fine,” Levi says. His voice is shaking. “Thought you were awake. Sorry.”

Erwin rubs his eyes. “I am now –”

“Go back to sleep.”

Then he’s standing and walking over to his tarp, shivering and clenching his teeth. Foolish.

The rest of the night, and the days after, pass quietly. Levi waits for the cannibals to find them, but their luck seems to be holding so far.

The Base is different than Levi expected.

It’s small, smaller than a standard office building, with one broken-down sentry post and a fence of rusted barbed wire in disrepair. They jump it easily.

The front door is so overgrown by ivy and grass and weeds that it’s hardly visible, and Levi has to cut down the growth with his sword. He feels himself smile, just the tiniest bit, as he does it.

Once they get inside, they come up short. The open door is the only source of light, and they have no flashlights. Erwin rummages around in his backpack and comes out with a white flag, on a small metal pole. He gives Levi a look.

“Doubt we’ll be needing this,” he says, and lights it on fire.

The flag burns better than Levi expects, given what he knows about fire regulations on such things, and they head inside. The door closes heavily behind them.

The radio control room is the largest, and they find it quickly. There’s a small window near the ceiling that lets in a tiny amount of light – just enough for Levi to watch Erwin work.

He connects and disconnects several radio lines, like an old phone operator, and then starts to dial in the frequencies so they can contact Control.

He finds it, but there’s no voice – only a series of beeps. Erwin’s brow furrows and he tilts his head, listening. He writes several letters in the air, expression focused.

After a few minutes, Erwin settles onto the ground, leaning against the radio panel. He turns to Levi.

“The frequency’s been compromised, somehow. They’ve got to build a new one. Message says to give him a few days.”

Levi grinds his teeth. “A few days?”

“Yes.”

“When did he leave this message?”

Erwin shakes his head. “I have no idea. I told him to give us two weeks to get here, and it’s been 15 days. So presumably, he left this message yesterday.”

“Presumably.”

“Yes.”

“What’s the worst case?”

“Worst case scenario is he’s dead, I suppose.”

“So we could just sit here with our thumbs up our asses for weeks just waiting for him.”

“We could.”

Levi sighs. “Shit.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Give him at least a day. Let’s see what we can find in here, then we’ll decide what to do.”

Levi nods, and they look around the base for anything useful – weapons, food, supplies.

They find the kitchen and Erwin whoops, loudly and just once, exactly the same as when he’d first fixed the radio. It reminds Levi of how Erwin had kissed him, that one moment when Erwin had forgotten everything except the sheer adrenaline of finding other survivors.

Levi licks his lips and flushes.

There are a few rations, even some vitamins and a water filter. Levi feels like he could laugh. They shove everything into their packs – along with a pot, another knife, and even a few spices. Erwin giggles at that. Levi’s still searching the room when his eyes fall on a bottle of whiskey.

He grins, sharp and quick, and says, “Hey.”

Erwin turns and when his eyes fall on the bottle in the low light, he laughs again. Levi has never heard him laugh so much;he likes the sound of it.

“I suppose that’s a way to pass the evening,” Erwin says, grinning. “Give Control some time to get that new radio built.”

Levi shrugs, but his chest is light and giddy and their packs have actual  _ food  _ in them and they take the whiskey back into the control room, settling onto the floor.

It’s been so long since Levi had alcohol that at the first sip he coughs violently, beating his chest, eyes watering. Erwin grins again and takes the bottle from him, but immediately does the same.

Levi snorts.

“Shut up,” Erwin mutters, and Levi can’t remember the last time he had such an easy moment with someone. He approaches it carefully, cautiously, settling across from Erwin and keeping some distance between them.

After an hour, Levi feels decidedly less careful. He leans over and takes the bottle from Erwin’s fingers, draining a quarter of it in one long, ill-advised gulp. He coughs and Erwin snorts. 

“Careful,” Erwin says, tone amused, and Levi watches the quirk of his mouth.

“Shut up.”

Erwin shrugs, takes a long drink himself. They settle comfortably into silence on the ground at the control panel, Levi with his back against the wall and Erwin with his back against the machine. Facing each other. 

Levi leans forward for the bottle again. 

“Don’t you think we should slow down?” Erwin asks the question even as he hands the bottle over. 

“Why?”

“Just seems...” Erwin pauses. “Responsible.”

Levi snorts. His head is lighter than before. “Responsible.”

“Yes.”

“You know the world ended, right?”

Erwin makes a face. “I suppose it did.” 

They go through half the bottle before it hits them, nearly at the same time. Erwin’s cheeks are pink and his voice is soft, softer than before. Levi feels all the knots of his insides loosening. 

“I did not ... take into account... the fact that I haven’t had alcohol in nearly two years.”

Levi sighs, louder than he means to. Erwin looks up at him. His eyes are soft and in the dark of the room, they look the same color as the sky, just after the sun goes down. Navy, sort of. 

“Navy?”

Levi hiccups. “Huh?”

“You just said ‘Navy, sort of.’” Erwin seems amused. 

“Oh.” Levi takes another drink. “Two years? Really?” 

Erwin shrugs. “By my count. Roughly, of course.”

“Shit.” 

Levi’s blood feels slower. When Erwin reaches toward him for the bottle, Levi shuffles over to lean against the control panel next to him. Their shoulders are a hair apart. 

Erwin drops his hand and gives him a look, so Levi shrugs and gives him the bottle. 

“Too far,” he explains. 

For a while, they sit in a warm, comfortable silence. Levi drinks until his head spins, then he stops. His shoulder is pressed against Erwin’s now. 

Erwin’s long fingers are on the bottle, fiddling unconsciously with it when he says, “Do you ever wonder if we deserved this? As a species?” 

Levi doesn’t hesitate. “No. I know we did.”

Erwin snorts, and Levi notices how pink his cheeks are, and the bridge of his nose. He looks warm and soft. 

“I should’ve guessed,” he says, but his voice sounds affectionate. “I wonder myself.” 

Levi wants to hear him talk, wants to sit here with his shoulder soaking up all Erwin’s warmth and listen to the quiet, slurred lilt of his voice, so he says, “Why?” 

“We were so...arrogant. As a species. It was bound to happen, wasn’t it?” 

“Mm.”

Erwin shifts, and the motion brings him closer to Levi - brings more points of contact between them. Levi does not know if it’s accidental or not. He fears he will burst into flame where they touch: shoulder, upper arm, elbow. Knees. 

“Do you know the story of Icarus?” Erwin asks, suddenly far more drunk than he had been before. All his words seem attached at the ends.

Levi lets his head thump backwards against the control panel and swallows. He can feel Erwin’s eyes on the movement of his throat. 

“Tried to fuck the sun,” Levi says, and Erwin bursts out laughing. 

“Not exactly.” Erwin is just drunk enough to be condescending, and Levi bristles. 

“Yes, exactly.” Levi is just drunk enough to be belligerent. “He was in love with Apollo.” He hiccups, then adds, “Duh.”

Erwin goes very quiet, eyes thoughtful if glassy. “Explain,” he says, voice soft, and there’s something shifting in the air but Levi is too drunk to notice it. 

“He wanted - he wanted.” Levi’s head spins, and he thinks of Apollo.

“I mean. Apollo’s up there all. Golden and pretty and shit,” Levi says, and the corner of Erwin’s mouth turns up quietly. “Probably rubbing it in Icarus’s face.” 

“You know he was the god of truth and prophecy, too? I mean. Yeah, the sun. Light, whatever.” Levi scrubs a hand over his face, conscious of the way he’s giving himself away but unable to stop it. “But truth too. And plague. And healing.”

Erwin says nothing and Levi does not look at him.

“He was a protector and all that shit, and he was also capable of bringing fucking – ” Levi reaches for the bottle again, despite telling himself he’s had enough. “Devastation, you fuckin’ name it. Plague, disease, war. Truth. That shit’ll destroy you, the truth.” He takes a long drink. “Something with that much power over people and Icarus still wanted to touch him. Headstrong little shit.”

He hands the bottle back and Erwin takes it without a word, utterly silent. Levi cannot meet his eyes.

“So this asshole looks up and sees something capable of ruining his goddamn  _ life _ ,” Levi says, emphatic in a way he hasn’t heard from himself in years, “and he thinks: thank fuck.” He’s never spoken so much at once. “Thank fuck this thing exists. This thing that is so beautiful it literally could kill me to look at.”

The bottle is nearly empty. Erwin has yet to take another drink - his hands are still around it. 

“Somethin’ about that, I guess,” Levi muses, voice slurred. “Something about loving a person capable of destroying you.” 

Erwin is still as a stone now, attention so focused on Levi he feels it like a physical weight. He’s hardly breathing.

“And Icarus - he’s thinking all that bullshit and he’s still just falling more and more in love with him every goddamn day.” Levi’s eyes find Erwin’s fingers on the neck of the bottle. He adds, “Probably going fucking insane wanting him.”

Erwin swallows, and somehow it’s so quiet in the room that Levi can hear it. He looks back up, tears his eyes off those long fingers and keeps talking, the most he’s ever spoken to anyone.

“Imagine just - imagine having to look at something like that all day,” he says, voice getting softer. He can’t look away from Erwin’s face now. He feels like a rabbit, caught in one of his own traps. “And not being able to - “

He stops, thinks again of Apollo: brilliant, blindingly beautiful Apollo - and looks at Erwin: Erwin and his gold hair curled under his ears and his long fingers on the neck of the whiskey bottle and his shoulders, sturdy and hot where they lean against Levi’s -

Levi feels his whole body flush under the weight of Erwin’s gaze. 

“To what?” Erwin’s voice is so intimate it’s painful, like a knife to Levi’s chest.

“To touch,” Levi says, barely a whisper. “All he wanted was to touch him. Just - just once.”

Something stretches endlessly in the closing space between them: as if there is an immeasurable distance separating them, but also as if there is nothing at all.

Erwin puts down the bottle, empty, and it rolls into the corner. The sound is deep, and round, and too loud, and it echoes in Levi’s skull when he looks Erwin in the face.

Erwin’s eyes are glassy but no less bright when he says, slurred and quiet: “I feel as if I’ve known you for a thousand years.”

Levi laughs - a soft, disbelieving sound that moves the overlong blonde hairs over Erwin’s eyes.

Erwin reaches out a hand and touches the side of Levi’s neck, fingers brushing over the frantic pounding of his pulse under his jaw. His palm is so warm. Levi feels his eyes flutter closed for half a second and he wrenches them back open again.

Erwin’s voice drops half a register. “This time,” he says, voice rumbling all the way through Levi’s chest like a roll of thunder, “you know I mean this.”

He’s inches away from Levi’s face, closer, and Levi can’t move and he’s so terrified of how badly he wants this that he can’t breathe, not a single shuddering gasp. Nothing.

Erwin’s eyelashes are blonde. Levi can’t feel his fingers. His hands are shaking at his sides, useless, clenched into fists.

Strangely, he thinks of Icarus again.  _ Probably going fucking insane wanting him.  _

Something crackles loudly over the speakers at their backs and they both start violently, jumping apart like teenagers caught breaking the rules.

“This is Control, does anyone read me? Repeat: this is Control, does anyone read me?”

Levi closes his eyes.

“Fuck,” he murmurs, barely a sound. Erwin looks at him, a considerable distance between them now.

It might as well be a goddamn ocean.

Erwin’s eyes – yes, navy in this light, that was right – flicker all over Levi’s whole face and Levi feels unnaturally exposed, like Erwin’s stripping the clothes right off him. Without any warning, Erwin leans forward and grabs Levi’s face in both hands.

Levi’s entire body flushes hot, then cold, then overwhelmingly hot again.

“We are not finished here,” Erwin says, mouth a hair away from Levi’s. Levi can practically taste it when he speaks. He rests their foreheads together, just long enough for Levi to lose all the breath in his chest, and then turns to the radio.  

“Control,” he says, voice ringing with command – sharp, authoritative. Levi slams his head back against the switchboard, trying to clear it. “This is Erwin. We read you.”  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh boy is there some SHIT going down next chapter, y'all. lemme know thoughts, if you like. love you bye


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Blood will tell, but often it tells too much."  
> -Don Marquis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> like, tarantino levels of blood.

There’s an explosion of noise, a room of people cheering raucously, and then Control’s voice comes back - there’s an unmistakable smile in it.

“Holy _shit_ are we glad to hear from you! Shit!”

Erwin grins, then reaches for Levi and squeezes the back of his neck. Levi feels his skin warm under Erwin’s fingers so fast he fears he’ll burst into flames, and he’s dizzy and sick and he might be dying, and then the hand is gone again.

“Honestly, Erwin, we cannot believe you made it there,” Control says, his voice so much clearer than before over the little radio.

“I was pretty sure he was gonna kick the bucket,” says a bright, headstrong voice Levi immediately identifies as Hope.

Control’s voice dips away from the receiver and says, “Eren, this is an open transmission channel now, remember? Like a phone?”

Hope says, “Huh?”

Erwin is grinning and carving the numbers of the new frequency on the top of their little radio, for when they need to leave again. Control and Hope are arguing quietly over the line, and there’s a sort of hopefulness in Erwin’s expression, and Levi feels a little sick. The whole thing has a strangely familial, relieved air that sets Levi’s teeth on edge.

They’re wasting time. Levi’s nightmare prickles at the back of his mind - _they’re coming_.

Levi speaks from where he stands at Erwin’s side, voice sharper than he means for it to be: “What do we do now, Control?”

The noise of conversation fades and Control comes back, all business.

“You two need to get to us. We have shelter, supplies. Walls. Those - people - they can’t get in here.”

“Where are you?” Erwin asks, eyes on Levi. As soon as he looks at him Levi feels it all the way to his toes,  to the bottom of his chest. The past hour comes back at Levi in a huge rush and it’s not the time, it’s not -

But it may never be the time again and so Levi holds his gaze for one self-indulgent moment, then watches the way Erwin’s eyes seem to catalogue Levi’s whole body: toes, knees, waist, chest housing his thundering heart. They linger on Levi’s throat, the place where his pulse is visible under his skin, and then on his mouth, on his tongue when he unconsciously licks his lips.

Control speaks and Levi still can’t take his eyes off Erwin.

“We’re on the coast. Maybe ten clicks north of the state border - you can’t miss the walls, you’ll run straight into us if you keep the coast in sight.”

Levi feels dizzy again, then remembers just how drunk they still are.

Erwin’s quiet a moment, then he finally looks away - Levi feels like he’s been released from a bear trap - and says, “Give us a month to get to you.”

“A month?” It’s Hope again, utterly incredulous. “Dude, that’s totally not enough - are you drunk or something?”

Levi snorts, then bites his lip to keep quiet. He looks up to find Erwin watching him again with strange expression on his face.

He feels, overwhelmingly, like he’s in a dream. Only a few minutes ago he was warm and sleepy and drunk and inches away from reaching out and touching Erwin’s face and now-

“Ah, shit.” Hope’s voice is far away, and there’s some sort of beeping over the line.

“Fuck, Arm-”

Control curses in a language Levi doesn’t recognize - German, maybe - and says, “Erwin, we’ve intercepted a message from - one of the frequencies that’s - uh, shit.”

“-have any scouts in the area? Fuck-”

Hope is still talking in the background, yelling over alarms.

“- closing fast, maybe ten clicks-”

“Get them the hell out of there, they’re coming-”

_They’re coming._

Levi remembers his dream, seeing his own severed head and Erwin’s, and grips Erwin’s forearm in warning.

The two of them stand utterly still, listening, the skin of Levi’s palm tingling where he touches Erwin’s arm. The Base is silent.

The other side of the line, however, is not.

Hope’s voice is frantic when he says from the back of the room, “Y’all better get the fuck out of there. Now.”

Levi is painfully aware of the fact that he’s still drunk. He wonders how he’s supposed to fight like this, thinks of all the bar fights he’s ever won, then thinks fleetingly of standing back to back with Farlan- passing a bottle of whiskey back and forth and throwing punches between drinks. It feels like a different life, so far away it hardly seems like a memory.

If anyone’s qualified to fight drunk, he supposes, it’s him.

Control says, “There are some, uh - people. Who seem to be tracking your radio signal, and, uh.” He clears his throat and Levi steps closer to the radio.

“They’re not -”

“We’ve met,” Levi says shortly. “How long do we have until they’re here?”

“Five minutes.” A new voice comes through the speaker, a woman, quiet and then louder as if she’s just walked into the room, and her voice is so full of violence it sends a chill down Levi’s spine. She sounds - intimately acquainted with Death.

Erwin takes out his gun, checks that it’s loaded, and looks at Levi.

“We need to get to the armory.”

“Wait.” The woman - Death, Levi thinks - speaks again. Her voice is cold, frightening, but powerful in a way that is difficult to place. “Go for their necks.”

Levi draws his sword and keeps his pocket knife in his other hand. “Their necks?”

Control says, “They don’t behave like normal people, it’s like their impervious to pain. It seems that they have something wrong with their nervous sy-“

“It doesn’t matter why,” Death cuts in. “Back of the neck puts them down.”

Levi puts out a hand and Erwin catches it, supports him. They look at each other a long moment.

“These are people we’re talking about,” Levi says in a low voice.

“Not anymore,” says Death.

“I don’t...I don’t understand.”

Death’s voice is hard. “You will.”

Control and Hope are yelling over one another, and Levi’s head feels like it’s going to explode.

“-Get out, get out of there-”

“-still have our frequency-”

“-for the neck, just run as fast as you -”

“-contact, just _get_ here -”

Erwin puts a hand on the back of Levi’s neck again, warm and familiar and the only thing that seems to make sense. Quietly, he says, “Levi. We _need_ to get to the armory.”

Levi’s eyes snap to Erwin’s. He forgets the radio, he forgets Control, he forgets the cannibals coming for them. Erwin’s eyes - still not entirely sober - are the only thing he knows.

Then Erwin says, “I’m almost out of bullets.”

Something like a lead weight settles sickeningly in Levi’s stomach. They are alone, in an abandoned military base, drunk, with very little ammunition or weapons. Their only help is a hundred miles away and it’s _real_ , this is so suddenly, horribly, viscerally real -

The front door, which Levi now realizes Erwin had locked and chained shut behind them, rattles.

Levi looks at Erwin and grips his sword so tight his knuckles turn white, but his hands stop shaking.

“We need to get to the armory.”

Levi feels himself sobering. Right. The armory.

Something loosens in Levi’s chest.

It’s always been like this. The threat of violence, of war, the urgency of approaching death - it’s always had a sort of calming effect on Levi. As if the world is finally snapping back to its rightful state. He always breathes a sigh of almost-relief, always feels his heart slow.

As if the world is reminding him: Of course. Yes. This is how it is. You almost forgot.

They make it to the armory. It’s stripped nearly bare, but there are a few things left: a couple boxes of ammunition for Erwin, a few more guns and explosives. Levi grabs a single claymore and runs to set it down in the narrow hallway.

Erwin hands him a shotgun, and Levi thinks viscerally of Kenny’s old sawed-off and says, sharper than he means, “No.”

The door rattles again. Levi can hear it down the long hallway. There are voices behind it, yelling. So they’re still in control enough to speak - bad sign.

Erwin says, “Take it, Levi.”

“I hate guns.”

Erwin’s eyes are hard. “Don’t be-“

Levi eyes a glint of silver under a bench on the far wall and pushes himself off the lockers toward it, cutting Erwin off.

He picks the knife up and grips it in his hand, feels the weight of the huge blade and sees his own dirty, exhausted reflection in the metal. The knife is as long as Levi’s forearm, though shorter than the sword.

With the sword in one hand, Levi throws the knife up in the air and catches it backhanded, _Earth grip_ , just the way he wanted.

He smiles at Erwin and it feels deranged on his face. The quiet intimacy of their moment earlier seems decades away.

“Don’t need ammunition for this.”

Erwin loads both of his handguns and puts them in holsters under his arms, straps a rifle to his back and grips an automatic AK with both hands. His eyes are more focused, more careful, and deader than Levi has ever seen them. As if Erwin has stepped back into a suit that fits him perfectly, that he never wanted to wear again.

“Do you know how to use that?” Erwin asks, and Levi thinks of the hours in Kenny’s basement, training and bleeding all over the floor. Remembers the care Kenny had taken in cultivating this one thing, this one aspect of Levi.

He bares his teeth again but it no longer resembles a smile. Erwin starts.

“Yeah,” he says, but his expression says more. Erwin nods.

They face each other: Levi, with a blade in each hand and another smaller one on his thigh, and Erwin with four guns and two grenades hanging from his belt.

Levi grips four old, unstable sticks of dynamite on his way out and then looks back at Erwin.

“Ready?”

Erwin nods. They hardly have time to look at each other before the door breaks down.

The cannibals - and they _are_ cannibals, that much is quite clear - are immediately forced into the bottleneck of the hallway. The claymore explodes and a horribly fine, warm mist lands on Levi’s skin.

There is a moment where the cannibals take a step back - wary of the explosion that evaporated some of them - and Erwin takes that moment to drop to one knee and take aim with the AK.

Levi wants to touch his shoulder, just this one time, but he cannot let go of the blades in his hands so instead he walks out into the hallway with Erwin kneeling behind him.

“Cover me?” he asks, and Erwin cocks the gun.

The cannibals are horrific. Their skin is dirty and bloody, thin and unhealthy and scabbed over in places. The proportions of their bodies seem wrong, like nature had made some sort of mistake it couldn’t stamp out, and their eyes are bloodshot and utterly devoid of reason.   
The sickness seems to have crawled inside them and rewired their minds, and Levi doesn’t hesitate when he cuts down the first one.

It’s warm, the blood on his wrists, and Levi feels a brief flicker of sick half-memory before he pushes it away again.

He moves fast. Much faster than they do.

He cuts four of them across the nape of the neck so deeply the heads roll off, and then he cuts five more.

He throws a stick of dynamite over their heads, and the answering explosion is a cloud of viscera that makes his stomach turn. He throws another, using his other hand to cut them down. Erwin grunts behind him but Levi can’t see him.

The forth stick of dynamite goes off in the hallway, blows the walls out in a shower of cement and insulation and Levi ducks, arms over his head, steel of his knives singing by his ears.

He loses track of how many arms he breaks, how many shoulders he grabs, how many throats he cuts by mistake.

They stumble, eyes rolling back in their head, but they _don’t go down_ unless Levi severs their spinal cords.

They keep coming. It’s like fighting a mob, somehow easier because most of them are simply pressing in, slow and fumbling.

One fights back hard, hangs Levi up for a precious half-second and another gets past them in the hallway, rounds on Levi and boxes him in. There are three, now. They lunge for him, throwing punches with the sort of wild, desperate air of animals fighting for their lives.   
One connects with Levi’s face and Levi feels his cheekbone fracture, feels the skin over his eyebrow split. He reels - he remembers how much these wounds bleed, and he will be blind soon - and Erwin’s voice rings out like a thunderclap through the hall.

“Down!”

Levi drops to one knee and rolls forward to the opposite wall while Erwin showers the hallway with bullets.

The wave of people - and Levi’s beginning to rethink the use of the word - slows, bullets ripping through their bodies.

Erwin doesn’t stop. He keeps shooting and _fuck, automatic weapons are terrifying_ and Levi can do nothing against the hail of gunfire except crouch, grateful for the reprieve but effectively trapped.

One of the cannibals drops to their knees and makes eye contact with Levi, reaches out and -

He can’t, he can’t move, he can’t defend himself without risking being shot -

“Erwin!” He calls out over the bullets, loud and authoritative and different than he’s heard himself speak in so many years.

Erwin stops immediately and Levi lashes out with both legs, elbows braced against the wall. The cannibal’s ribcage crumples under the force of Levi’s kick and Levi manages to sink his knife into the nape of its - _its_ , like an animal - neck.

He pants, looks over at Erwin and moves a step toward him with blood warm and heavy and sticky all over his skin. The cut on his eyebrow is bleeding too much, making it almost impossible to see. He tries to wipe it away.

“I need cover but I can’t move when you fire that thing,” he says, eye squinted shut with blood. He has a strange memory of Kenny warning him of this, the blood and the blinding, but manages to shake it off. He turns around and guts a cannibal in the hallway. It’s insides fall out at Levi’s feet, disconcertingly warm.

Erwin’s already drawing his handguns and Levi turns briefly back to him with his sword halfway through a cannibal’s neck.

“Alright?”

Erwin doesn’t answer except to cock both handguns at once, then start shooting through napes with devastating accuracy.

Time passes in a strange blur, a haze of limbs and fists and elbows and blood, so much blood. The cut over Levi’s eye is bleeding so badly it’s all the way down the side of his face, down his throat.

Erwin calls his name and Levi turns in time to catch the shotgun shell Erwin throws him.

He breaks it open while Erwin covers him, a haze of bullets so close to him that he can almost feel the wind from them. The gunpowder inside the shell is dark and smells warm and Levi pours it over the cut on his eyebrow.

It stings, of course, but it stops the bleeding. Levi wipes his face and this time it stays clear. He has both eyes back. He nods at Erwin briefly before Erwin shoots two more cannibals beside him.

It’s staggering, the speed and accuracy Erwin shoots with. He reloads so fast Levi hardly notices it. He never misses.

Levi stays low, gets the ones that make it past the bullets, and after what could have been 10 minutes or 4 hours, the hallway is a mess of corpses.

It’s over just like that.

It’s silent, strangely so. Levi is hyper aware of the sound of his own breathing and the metallic, warm-iron smell of blood on him.

Erwin is panting, too, and there’s blood on his shirt and his hands and a bruise on one side of his jaw. There is a pile of corpses under him.

Levi hadn’t even noticed any getting past him. He’s lucky Erwin isn’t dead.

Erwin stands, seems to take stock of himself, then steps on top of the corpses and says to Levi, “Are you alright?”  

Levi nods, strangely affected by the way the blood and sweat in Erwin’s hair makes it hang in his eyes, by the deep purple under the skin of his jaw. The bruise moves him. He wants to sink his fingers into it, though he doesn’t know why.

They head toward the door, but voices stop them both in their tracks. Levi ducks behind a doorway and pulls Erwin with him.

“-exceptionally dangerous, I’d say.”

“Yeah, I’d have to agree with you.”

It’s two people talking, a man and a woman. Clear and lucid and terrifying.

“We’re gonna have to be careful. Follow at a distance.” The woman. Her voice is clever, sharp and strangely crude.

“Ymir, are you sure they’re gonna lead us -“

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

Erwin and Levi look at each other. Something drops like a stone in Levi’s stomach. The blood over his knuckles where he grips his blades is tacky and thick; it itches.

“-should find them soon, otherwise we’re going to lose-“

The two voices float past them, stepping carelessly over their comrades. Something is different about the way their footfalls sound. Measured. Completely in control.

Levi does not feel prepared to fight them, for reasons he doesn’t understand.

As soon as their voices turn a corner Levi is moving, trusting that Erwin will keep up. He does.

They make it out of the building with the radio - a miracle - and mostly intact. Levi is absolutely covered in blood. Erwin is once again low on ammunition.

“We have to go,” Levi says, voice still ringing with that uncomfortable authoritative tone he hasn’t used in years. “Now.”

Erwin nods in agreement, then says, “We should go this way-” he points. “It’ll be harder for them to track us.”

Levi nods, says, “Go ahead.”

Erwin turns as if he’d been waiting for permission and a strange, hot thrill runs up the backs of Levi’s heels.

They walk for nearly an hour before either of them speaks.

They want to be sure the two cannibals from the Base haven’t followed them, looking over their shoulders incessantly, doubling back and running in circles. They end up in a stream, walking up the shallow bed with their feet in the water. It’s freezing but nearly impossible to track.

Finally, they both relax almost at the same moment. Erwin ducks down to a crouch and washes his hands in the frigid water and Levi does the same. The blood slides over his skin again once it’s wet, slippery and awful before it washes away.

Levi rubs his face with his wet hands, then bends and washes his face and hair in the water. The gunpowder over his eye washes away and the cold against it is a relief. The cut has mostly scabbed on its own, now. Levi lets himself enjoy the brief feeling of being clean, the cold shock of water and then air against his skin, his hair.

When he comes up and pushes his wet hair out of his face, Erwin is watching him with an expression so pained and rapt it shocks Levi to the bottom of his spine.

“What?” he asks, though they both know.

Erwin stares, lips parted, blood on his shirt. His eyes flicker up to the pale, newly exposed skin of Levi’s forehead, over the dark slick of his hair, linger on the dip of Levi’s throat where he hasn’t quite managed to get all the dirt and blood off.

Levi feels the heat of that stare through the freezing water.

Erwin finally turns without responding and they continue for several minutes before he says, “I had no idea you could fight like that.”

“You’re a good shot,” Levi counters. _Both of us are violent animals_ , he wants to say. He feels ashamed from Erwin’s tone of voice: awestruck, almost afraid.

“I’ve had training,” Erwin says. Their steps are numb now. They are covering good ground. Levi wonders how long they will have to walk in the river. “You didn’t tell me you’d served.”

“I didn’t.”

“I thought you were a safe cracker.”

“I was.”

Erwin turns, still walking. “You don’t fight like one.”

Levi shrugs. “You fight just like a soldier.”

“I was a soldier.”

“I know.”

Levi turns away and keeps walking through the freezing water. He watches the late afternoon sun poking through the trees, scratching at the blood still on his throat and wondering if they’ve done enough. Wondering if they lost their pursuers or if they were somewhere out there, watching in the trees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some THINGS are about to happen yall. well. aside from the things that just happened.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> NSFW.

Hours pass and finally, finally, they spot a cave far up the riverbank. Levi would be grateful to have his feet out of the water if he could feel them. The ground feels strangely soft, and his feet register nothing but pinpricks and the odd feeling of sand where there is only rocks. He hopes he hasn’t done any serious damage to the nerves of his feet.

The cave is extensive, with a hole in the top all the way in the back, around a corner. They figure they can risk a small fire - they have no choice, it’s freezing - and the second Levi sets his feet in front of it he feels achingly more human.

They sit in silence for a time, drying their clothes and trying not to shiver. Levi fears he will never wash all the blood off himself.

Erwin is across the fire, expression closed and hands folded in front of him. He is utterly silent for a long time. The fight replays in Levi’s head, over and over again. So much blood. He remembers his cheekbone bruising, maybe even breaking. He can hardly feel it now - just a dull, hot pulse of blood there. He has no idea how many he killed.

Levi can’t stop scratching at his own neck, shoulders. The places where he has little flakes of dried blood peeling off his skin. It becomes too much, the warm tightness of the blood and Erwin’s silence, and he leaves the cave in a huff, tearing off his shirt and dropping it on the ground.

The water is so cold it shrinks the air in his lungs so that he feels inside out, punched in the chest. It’s so cold it hurts, so cold his toes are numb after only a few minutes. But he stands to his waist in the deepest part and scrubs the blood off his chest, then scrubs at his pants still on his legs. He ends up going back for his shirt and scrubs at that too, puts it back on and washes it against his body.

When he returns, shivering and dripping all over the floor but finally clean, Erwin does not look at him. Levi stands in front of the fire and rings out the front of his shirt, goosebumps all over his skin. The fire is wonderfully warm.

“Better?” Erwin asks the fire. He is strange and quiet and his voice is short, deep in thought.

Levi furrows his eyebrows. His hair is dripping freezing, clean little rivulets down the back of his neck, behind his ears, over his forehead where one wet piece of it has fallen down. The cold water on the tender, swollen skin over his cheekbone is better than anything he’s felt all day.

He feels cleaner than he has in months, and more himself for it.

“You should’ve asked for help, before,” Levi says, sitting on a rock in front of the fire, and Erwin still stares into the fire with his hands folded.

“When we were fighting at the Base,” Levi elaborates. He remembers the pile of corpses Erwin had stood on. “You almost died.”

Erwin laughs harshly, finally goaded into a response. His hands are still folded but his eyes leave the fire when he says, “ _I_ almost di-”

Erwin’s words die in his mouth, trail off as soon as his eyes lift to Levi. They follow the tracks of the cold water over his skin raptly, intently.

Levi can feel the fabric of his shirt sticking to his chest, knows how it must look. Erwin can’t take his eyes off him. He squeezes his hands together until Levi can see the knuckles turning red, then white.

Levi puts his cold hands in front of the fire palms out, open, vulnerable. He watches the bob of Erwin’s Adam’s apple as his eyes drag down Levi’s forearms to his bare palms.

Erwin takes a breath, then continues, “I almost died?”

His voice is softer than before, broken and rougher. “You were covered in _fucking_ blood, Levi.”

He stresses the word, almost angry. Levi can’t remember ever hearing that word come out of Erwin’s mouth before. Hearing it now, soaking wet in the warm orange light of the cave, sears his insides.

He shrugs to hide his shiver.

“It wasn’t mine,” he says.

Erwin’s eyes are on his face now, holding his gaze inescapably, terribly. The silence stretches.

“How many have you killed?” Erwin asks, and Levi knows he means before.

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly. He still blames himself for so many of them - Isabel, Farlan. Others. He as good as killed them.

Erwin’s eyes go back to Levi’s hands, seem to linger on his knuckles where Levi knows he has a mess of scar tissue.

“You look cold,” Erwin says suddenly, and then stands and walks over to him. He kneels on the stone floor of the cave. On his knees, he’s the same height as Levi, sitting on his rock.

He’s so close. His body heat is oppressively warm, impossibly tempting. Levi’s skin is so cold it feels blue. The wet shirt plasters the cold to him like a blanket.

Erwin’s voice is barely a murmur when he reaches forward for Levi’s shirt. Levi feels like he might pitch sideways into the fire.

“You should remove this,” Erwin says, feigning casual, like he’s just being practical. His fingers are scorching in contrast to Levi’s freezing skin. Erwin takes Levi’s shirt, then his undershirt, which he has to peel off Levi’s body like a layer of skin. It feels utterly obscene, like he’s never been so naked in his life.

Without the shirts though, the warmth of the fire on his naked torso is almost too much. It’s a pleasure so absolute and so shocking that Levi closes his eyes and hisses a breath through his teeth.

He is astounded by how much warmer it is.

He opens his eyes again and finds Erwin’s gaze on his chest, fingers hovering inches away from touching Levi’s skin like he’s stopping himself. Erwin’s cheeks are flushed.

“That’s warmer,” Levi says, hardly a murmur. “Thanks.”

Erwin’s eyes flicker up to Levi’s - yes, up, he’s sunk down onto his heels now and he has to tilt his face up to look at Levi - and they are warmer and darker than Levi has ever seen them.

“You move so easily,” Erwin whispers, almost reverent. “So fast. Like a knife.” His fingers just barely touch the edges of Levi’s collarbone, trailing from the goosebumped skin down to the cold oversensitive nipple and Erwin’s fingers are so searingly hot, too hot, Levi will never survive, it _hurts_ -

He draws a sharp breath and Erwin pulls his hands away, eyes still on the droplets of water drying on Levi’s chest.

“How do you know how to move so fast?” Erwin asks.

“I don’t want to talk about it now.”

“No?” Erwin’s hands come back to hover over the skin of Levi’s bare chest again.

“No.”

Erwin seems somehow closer. When he speaks, it’s so soft Levi has to watch his mouth to hear it.

“What do you want to talk about?” Erwin’s mouth says.

Levi is at a complete loss for words. Erwin’s eyes are dark in the firelight, and sometimes flecks of brilliant blue will catch in the sparks of it. His mouth is softer than Levi realized. He never really let himself look.

Before Levi can speak, Erwin lays his whole hand against Levi’s side, palm flat and hot over his ribcage. It is a shock that Levi has never felt in his life. Levi feels like the only part of his body that’s alive is the part Erwin is touching, _searing_ , with his warm, warm hands.

“What is this?” he asks. Levi knows he means the tattoo warming under his fingers.

“Dove,” Levi says shortly. Erwin traces the lines of it gently and his fingers are so warm and earlier they had ripped through so many corpses without a second thought-

He shivers, feeling himself flush.

“For Isabel,” he elaborates. Erwin’s face draws up into something sad before smoothing out again. His fingers move up to the words in Hebrew, over the bird.

“Old Jewish prayer,” Levi says. Strange, how easily he trusts Erwin with such intimate parts of himself. “My mother used to say it with me.”

Erwin shuffles closer, skin warm and flushed pink from the fire and from Levi. He hopes.

Erwin’s fingers run up the curve of Levi’s shoulder, the curl of his bicep.

“Thought you hated guns,” Erwin says as he traces the double barrel pistol on Levi’s arm.

“I do.”

It is so quiet inside the cave. Never has a person touched him this way. He feels like Erwin is stripping the skin off him, laying him completely, helplessly bare.

“I had no idea you had this under that shirt,” Erwin says softly, fingers buzzing and hot where he traces over the lines of ink.

Levi does not know if he means his skin, the tattoos, or the sheer undeniable vulnerability. He shrugs, and Erwin leans so close that Levi can smell him. He smells like campfire smoke, and blood, and the rich dirt of the woods.

It is such a pure animal smell that Levi feels his toes curling where he sits. Everything is so quiet. Levi can feel his knuckles screaming with strain where he grips the seat of the rock he sits on, refusing to move his hands to touch Erwin.

Erwin leans in even closer, and then Levi feels a thrill of something so close to fear that he can’t even name it when Erwin’s nose skirts the edge of his jawline.

“And what’s this?” he says, whispered into the skin of Levi’s throat. He touches Levi’s pounding pulse point with warm, calloused hands. Levi feels himself melting.

“What’s what,” Levi chokes out.

Erwin presses against his pulse a little and Levi feels himself get dizzy, a thrill of searing heat and buzzing tingles from the crown of his head to the backs of his heels.

“Fear,” Levi whispers into the air, “that’s fear.”

Erwin’s nose is back at Levi’s jaw, lips barely a breath from his skin. “Is it?”

Levi can’t breathe. “No. It’s not.”

“I thought not.”

“Why?”

“You fight like you aren’t afraid of anything,” Erwin’s mouth says, nearly silent.

Levi huffs a laugh. “I’m afraid of plenty,” he says.

Erwin’s hands are both on him now, fingertips trailing down the side of his throat to settle against his collarbones. One hand lifts to Levi’s face and Levi feels everything inside him freeze and then melt almost in the same instant.

Erwin’s thumb touches his mouth, thumbnail digging gently into Levi’s bottom lip.

“Like what?”

“Just fucking do it, Erwin.”

There it is, again. That rush of heat and adrenaline at speaking that name. So strangely personal, so close.

Erwin’s mouth curls into a slow, clever smile. Levi has never seen such an expression on his face.

“Do what?” he asks, and Levi’s skin is finally warm from the fire and his chest is so _naked_ and his blood is buzzing and he can’t take it anymore.

He moves his hands from the rock - the knuckles crack and groan in protest, he’s been gripping so hard - and sinks both of his hands into Erwin’s hair and kisses him.

Finally.

Erwin makes a sound that Levi will remember until he dies, and two huge, hot hands grip his sides and slide around to his back. He feels so utterly naked. Erwin’s hands cannot possibly be this hot.

They’re everywhere, his hands. Curling into his shoulders, tracing his sides, bumping every notch in his spine. Feverish, greedy. Levi didn’t expect this. He expected something measured, almost gentle. He’d dreamt of it. Not this.

Erwin cannot seem to stop touching him. His hands come around to Levi’s chest, to his thundering heart under his rib cage, and he bites the side of Levi’s jaw so hard Levi hisses and pulls Erwin’s hair.

Erwin pulls back and looks at him, eyes wilder than Levi has ever seen them. They make the fire look tame, dull in comparison. He reaches up and runs a hand through Levi’s hair, expression a mix of reverence and desperate hunger.

“We shouldn’t,” Levi hears himself say. Erwin’s eyebrows draw together.

“Why?”

Levi doesn’t have an answer for that. The fire crackles quietly and Erwin is lit only in yellow and orange and it’s all he was ever made for, the blue of his eyes the only thing that isn’t touched by gold on his whole body. Levi’s breath catches.

Erwin shifts forward even further, so close his torso presses along the insides of Levi’s thighs, his stomach. He is so warm. He looks up, hands on Levi’s legs, then his ankles, then his feet. Then back up again to his waist, his shoulders, his arms.

Levi has never had someone so clearly and utterly desperate to touch him. It’s overwhelming. He’s almost afraid.

“Do you – ” Erwin cuts himself off, as if a thought is just occurring to him. His cheeks flush and he looks down at Levi’s naked chest, then back up to his face. “Do you want this?”

_I will die without it_ , Levi wants to say, at the same time he wants to say, _I will die if you give it to me._

Erwin watches something in his expression and then the corner of his mouth quirks up and he continues, “Thinly veiled metaphors aside, that is.”

Levi huffs a laugh. “Hey. I was drunk.”

“You compared me to a god.”

“I was very drunk.”

“Are you drunk now?”

Levi hesitates. Erwin’s skin is impossibly, almost unbearably warm and he smells _so_ good, like sinking into clean earth. His hair is so soft it hurts Levi’s hands to touch it. He realizes with a jolt that his hands never left Erwin’s hair.

He feels overwhelmed, dizzy and intoxicated, utterly broken open by Erwin’s mere proximity. His smell. The dip at the base of his throat and the painful gracefulness of his fingers.

_Yes_ , he wants to say, but he knows what Erwin means.

“No.”

He runs his hands through Erwin’s hair and over the shell of one ear, finds his pulse under the skin of his throat and sets his fingers against it. He could kill him so easily like this. Erwin knows it. His heartbeat is faster than Levi’s. His eyes shut, slowly, and he tilts his head back.

It is the most shocking thing Levi has ever seen, the line of Erwin’s eyelashes against his cheeks, the open vulnerability of his throat. It moves something in him and he speaks.

“I want it,” Levi says with his fingers deadly on Erwin’s pulse, in a soft rush as if the words could cause him pain. They do.

Erwin opens his eyes and looks at him. His mouth curls up again. He stands and takes Levi with him, hands on Levi’s waist as he pushes him against the cold cave wall.

“Yes?” he says, breathes the word against Levi’s mouth like it’s obscene. It is.

“Yes.”

Everything blurs after that.

Erwin is no less feverish, and Levi is no less shattered. There is a horrible, overwhelming sense of urgency to them, as if their hands on each other are the only things keeping them alive.

For a time, Levi lets himself be crushed against the wall of the cave - cold, unrelenting stone under his shoulder blades - just to hear the noises Erwin makes, to taste the utter desperation on his tongue.

“Fuck- Levi.“

It shocks him, to hear Erwin stutter his name out like this. It is like being suddenly submerged in hot water, a flush that crawls over his skin and all the way inside him. His cock twitches when Erwin says it again, sharp and urgent this time:

“Levi-“

His hands are shaking on Levi’s torso, the lines of his chest and stomach. They shake as they fumble to unbutton his pants - _fumble_ , and that is not a thing Levi even thought Erwin capable of doing - and they shake harder when Erwin dips careful fingers inside the waistband, pressed along the soft skin over Levi’s hips.

Erwin is gasping now, as if he has run a great distance. He presses so close Levi feels the wall bruising his back. Erwin shoves his face into the crook of Levi’s neck and just stands there, one hand shoved halfway down Levi’s pants and the other hand on the small of his back, crushing their bodies together. He whimpers against Levi’s throat.

“You almost died,” he says in a torn open voice, “so many times today.”

It seems to cause Erwin pain to even consider it. He sinks his teeth into the muscle between Levi’s neck and shoulder and Levi feels himself tense and then relax all at once, boneless, like all his strings have been cut.

“I didn’t,” Levi says, slurred together. He sags against Erwin when he bites him again. His blood is thundering in his ears. He’s painfully hard.

“You did,” Erwin says, and his voice is creeping higher and softer, almost like a moan. Levi has never heard him speak like this before.

Erwin’s desperate, shaking hands slide down Levi’s arms, then grip his hands. He seems fascinated by the strength in them. He says, “You did, and then you didn’t.”

And then Erwin’s hands are all over him again, ceaseless. Levi’s breath hitches when he responds.

“Hard - to kill.”

Levi’s eyes roll back into his head when Erwin rolls his fingers across a nipple. The last word, _kill_ , stretches out into something depraved. Obscene. Filthier than anything he’s ever said.

“Good,” Erwin says, and his voice is a whimper. “Don’t- don’t get-“ he cannot finish his sentence and instead says, “Stay, stay here. Please.”

Levi doesn’t respond, though he wants to. He wants to bury his face in Erwin’s hair and push himself all the way inside him and say, _Always, I will always stay. Tell me to live and I will._

Erwin’s teeth find his shoulder and bite so hard Levi fears it will bleed, yet he can’t stop the almost violently needy sound that it tears out of him.

Erwin runs his teeth over Levi’s collarbone but doesn’t bite down, and Levi’s knees shake.

“You like this?” Erwin asks, and Levi snorts. Nevermind the liquid heat that floods through his body when Erwin asks that question. The tone of his voice, as if the answer matters more than anything ever has.

“Hate it,” Levi says, grinning just a bit. Erwin laughs against his chest and then he’s kissing him again.

It’s strange. It’s strange how Levi can be so sure that he’s never been alive until this, that his heart had never before pumped blood except to rush to the places Erwin now set his teeth.

Erwin’s teeth drag over Levi’s bottom lip and he moans, without meaning to. Erwin’s next kiss is sloppier, smiling. He tastes like warmth and fire and the softness of a newborn earth.

Finally Levi shoves at him with considerable strength, and Erwin stumbles backwards. Levi makes a show of rubbing at his shoulder blades, watches Erwin while he does it. Erwin flushes.

“Sorry.”

Levi shrugs.

He walks toward Erwin and watches as Erwin backs up, almost shrinking away from him except for the dark, pleased expression on his face. He pushes until Erwin is sitting on the rock in front of the fire, the same one Levi had been sitting on earlier.

He means to drop to his knees the same way Erwin had, but two huge hands grip his hips and stop him in his tracks.

His chest is still naked, his pants still halfway open from before, and Erwin keeps one hand tight on Levi’s hip when he carefully reaches to dip under Levi’s waistband again with the other one. He never looks away from Levi’s face. His fingers are so warm against the soft skin underneath Levi’s hips.

In this position, Levi is so much taller than Erwin that it makes him dizzy. His cock is nearly level with Erwin’s face. Both of them are holding their breath, as if they are waiting for the Earth to start turning again. It doesn’t.

“Fuck,” Erwin whispers, eyes never leaving Levi’s. Watching Erwin’s mouth make that word, watching the way his eyes burn when he says it, rushes such an unbearable heat through Levi that he nearly falls to his knees.

Erwin says, “Your hair is still wet,” as if it is an explanation for his obscenity. Levi reaches up to run his hands through it, curious, and finds that it is indeed still wet. Cold, too, in comparison to his fire-warmed skin.

And to the look on Erwin’s face.

Levi freezes with one hand in his hair and watches Erwin watch him, expression torn open so completely, almost carelessly. He looks devastated, pained. His hands are frozen on Levi’s skin, one on his hip and one dipped under his waistband. He’s shaking.

“I understand,” he says, and even his lips are shaking with desperate urgency, “What you meant. About wanting something- “

He stops, and Levi unfreezes himself to reach down and sink his fingers slowly, carefully into Erwin’s soft hair. Erwin still looks up at him, eyes drifting closed at the feeling and then opening again.  

He takes a breath and then clarifies, as Levi has been waiting for him to do: “About wanting something capable of. Of destroying you.”

There is nothing left in Levi’s body except the dizzy pounding of his heart and the ache in his cock, but at that something squeezes his chest with the force of a vice. An emotion he cannot identify seizes through him, sears the inside of his ribcage like a brand.

Erwin chooses that moment to wrap his warm, wonderful fingers around Levi’s cock and pull it out of his pants, and he kisses it once almost chastely before swallowing the whole thing.

Levi feels the ground disappear from under his feet. He doesn’t know where he is. His hands are pulling too hard at Erwin’s hair, but he can’t stop himself. Erwin’s eyes drift closed like he’s - _praying_ -

He cannot handle this. He will die if this continues. Erwin will hollow him out until there is nothing left of him.    
Erwin’s tongue rubs just under the head of Levi’s cock and someone moans - it’s impossible to say who, Levi isn’t even sure which one of them is which - so loud that it echoes off the walls of the cave and comes back, twice as obscene as before.

Levi is panting; he can hardly hold up his own weight and Erwin is drooling all over his cock, eyes closed and hair so painfully soft and gold under Levi’s hands.

It goes on and on, slow and almost painful in its pleasure. Erwin takes his time, _enjoying himself,_ making little noises and gripping Levi’s hips hard enough to bruise.

Is he dead? He must be. This feeling ripping through him can’t be anything other than death.

“Oh my god.” Someone is talking. The sound is trembling, desperate, high like standing on the edge of a very tall cliff.

“Oh - _oh_ my -"

Levi thinks of Eros, the god of desire, setting fire to men’s hearts with his dreadful torches. Erwin’s fingers burn him.

“Jesus fucking -“ Oh. That’s him. He’s talking. Levi hardly recognizes his own voice.

“Fucking Christ, I can’t - please, I -"

He is hardly aware of it, of himself speaking. Nothing he can say could possibly articulate the desperate rush of feeling flooding his overcrowded chest.

“ _Erwin-”_

Ah. Nothing except that.

Erwin moans around him at the sound of his name, at the way Levi’s voice cracks on it, and the vibrations he makes send a shockwave all the way to Levi’s toes. He says it again. And again.

_Erwin Erwin Erwin Erwin_ -

He says it until it means nothing, until it means everything. He says it until it is all there is to say. Until it is all he ever wants to say again for the rest of his days.   
And every time, every single time the intimacy of it shocks him. Sends little sparks to his fingers, curled in Erwin’s hair.

Erwin’s spit-slick finger presses gently behind Levi’s balls and a rush of panic rolls through him - they don’t have anything for-

But it is followed almost immediately by a blind, devoted sort of trust that fills Levi’s whole chest and says _he would never_ and _anything, anything_ all at once.

He tilts his head back and digs his fingers into Erwin’s head and screams when he comes.

It devastates him. His ears are ringing when he comes back to himself, and he sinks to his knees on shaking legs, then settles down to sit on the floor. He leans against Erwin’s legs and finds himself with his head in Erwin’s lap.

Erwin’s fingers are gentle in Levi’s cool wet hair, smoothing it back from his face. Levi makes a motion to the- _huge, Jesus Christ -_ cock in Erwin’s pants, still hard and inches from his face, but Erwin makes a noise and Levi pauses.

“Please, don’t,” Erwin says, in a voice that sounds strangely sated and sleepy, as if he’s the one who had the orgasm. “Please, just let me give you this.”   
Levi closes his eyes and rests his head on Erwin’s leg. He is so warm.

“Why?” He asks, voice slow and syrupy. His legs are still shaking. His heart is still pounding. He feels immeasurably safe here, with his head in Erwin’s lap.

“Because I want to,” Erwin says, simple and quiet.

Levi is sliding inexorably toward sleep now and could no stop it if he wanted to. Erwin smells too good, his skin is too warm, his hands in Levi’s hair are too wonderful.

“Thank you,” Levi says, softly. He cannot remember saying it in many years.

“Don’t,” Erwin murmurs. His voice is so soft. “I was selfish. I wanted to see your face.”

“Mm?”

“Mm. Beautiful.”

Levi’s blush is a slow, warm thing, up the back of his neck and over his ears. Erwin’s fingers follow it and he huffs something like a laugh. It is...affectionate. Comfortable.

“Good night, Levi,” Erwin’s soft gold voice says, and Levi is already asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> love you guys tune in next week to see more bullshit


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> SO nsfw.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you guys i am so sorry i can't believe how long this chapter is. i have no excuse.

Levi wakes with a kink in his neck about an hour later, and it takes him a moment to realize his head is still in Erwin’s lap. It takes him another moment to realize that Erwin is awake, and then the slow, distant realization that Erwin is running his fingers through his hair.

Levi grunts, tells himself he’s too tired to move and simply opens his eyes.

Erwin’s hand sinks into his hair like it’s in slow motion, brushing it out of his face, scratching over his scalp.

“It’s long,” Erwin says softly, and his voice is strange – as if he’s just on the verge of shattering this strange bubble of dreamy softness, but hasn’t quite managed it yet. “Your hair.”

Levi turns his face into Erwin’s leg and mumbles something, but it has no intention of being a real word. Erwin smells impossibly good. Absurdly good, considering they have no laundry machines, no showers, none of the things they used to have.

“Why do you smell so good,” Levi mutters into the heat of Erwin’s hip, pushing his head a little into Erwin’s hands when he pets his hair again. It feels nice.

Erwin laughs. “I don’t.”

“Yes, you do.”

Erwin’s other hand comes up and both are in his hair now, one finger tracing his hairline so tenderly it almost shocks Levi into standing up.

“Body chemistry,” Erwin murmurs. He scratches his nails over Levi’s scalp and Levi sighs without meaning to.

“What, like my body likes being near your body?”

As soon as the words come out of his mouth he flushes, hot and embarrassed. Six months ago he never would have said something so ridiculous. Two weeks ago he wouldn’t have.

Erwin simply says, “Yes.”

Levi doesn’t know how to respond; there’s something seizing his chest up tight and hot, and something titanic loosening it at the same time. He’s exhausted by all this conflicting physical feeling. Humans aren’t supposed to be so confusing.

“We should sleep,” Levi says, and it occurs to him belatedly that he has been asleep for over an hour, that he said  _ we  _ because he meant  _ sleep with me. _

Erwin gently takes his fingers out of Levi’s hair, and Levi rolls onto the floor next to the fire. Erwin joins him a moment later with a blanket.

“Scoot over, let me put this under you.”

Levi looks up. “You got the packs?” He hadn’t even noticed, in all the –

The violence of the past day suddenly falls on him like a storm cloud and he’s painfully exhausted, utterly wrung out. There’d been so much blood, and most of them hadn’t even screamed – but some had.

How had he forgotten so soon?

Erwin spreads a blanket under him and settles onto it, then pulls Levi very close. It’s been so long since Levi allowed someone to hold him like this that he immediately feels trapped, instinctively wants to turn away and  _ run _ in the opposite direction.

But then Erwin maneuvers them so that his chest is pressed warmly to Levi’s back and settles his chin over Levi’s shoulder, and something cracks through Levi’s whole body like ice on a frozen lake.

Erwin seems to read Levi’s expression and then says, very softly, “Are you alright?”

Levi nods. He doesn’t trust himself to speak. He falls asleep almost immediately.

_ He dreams. _

_ It’s a dream he hasn’t had in a long time, but one he’s achingly familiar with. _

_ He’s in a warehouse – dream-warped, all white, but bearing some resemblance to the real thing. Counting diamonds. In the dream, they give off thousands of little rainbows when he touches them, like tiny fireworks. _

_ The gunshot echoes so loud it’s like it’s inside his head, and Levi’s entire chest opens up like a wound when he sees a soft, familiar hand reaching for him. A voice, shaking, desperate to say this one last thing: _

_ “Boss, I –” _

_ Another gunshot, and Levi feels something wet and horribly warm on his face – _

He shoots up, covered in sweat, shaking uncontrollably.

Erwin, also awake, doesn’t say anything, but he puts a very careful hand between Levi’s shoulder blades and leaves it there.

The sunlight is weak and yellow, leaking in at a slant through the mouth of the cave. The fire is out. Levi can hear birds, and the rush of the river, and he relaxes into the hand Erwin has pressed to his back.

After some time, Levi settles back down, finds himself resting his head on Erwin’s shoulder without really thinking about it. Erwin is warm and solid next to him. Alive.

“May I ask you something, Levi?”

Every time he says his name, every  _ single  _ time, Levi feels it all the way to the arches of his feet.

He knows it will be about the dream, and he almost says no.

“Alright.”

Erwin waits a beat, perhaps to give Levi another chance to turn him down, but when he doesn’t Erwin says, “Who is Petra?”

Levi hasn’t heard her name in six years and it feels like a knife opening his chest, his stomach. Gutting him in one motion.

Erwin pulls back to look at his face, and then says, “Ah. I’m sorry.”

Levi shakes his head. He needs to explain, it wasn’t –

“No,” he says, voice hoarse. He feels far too exposed. “It wasn’t like that.”

“No?”

Levi hesitates. “I – don’t. I don’t know,” he answers honestly. “I don’t. She.”

It hurts so much more than he thought it would, because more than any of the others,  _ that one  _ had been his fault.

“She was shot,” Levi says shortly. His voice sounds like he hasn’t slept in weeks. “She was - I was – ” He doesn’t know how to articulate it, and he has never explained himself like this to anyone. He breathes and tries again. 

“She was family. To me. I - loved her like family.” God, it  _ hurts _ , talking about it, like cutting out his lungs and putting them into Erwin’s open hands.

“She - didn’t feel quite the same. She wanted - more.” 

His voice cracks and he clears his throat, glad Erwin cannot see his face. He has no idea what he would find there if he could. 

Erwin’s body heat against him is suddenly oppressive, his arms like a cage, and panic rises in Levi’s chest like a deadly tide. 

“Levi -”

“We should get moving,” he says, already slipping out of Erwin’s arms and rolling to his feet. He suppresses the shiver that threatens at the base of his spine when he realizes just how cold the early morning air is without Erwin. 

“Levi.” 

“No, Erwin.”  _ Don’t make me beg. I will. _

Erwin is silent for a time and then there’s shuffling from his direction, but Levi still can’t turn to look at him. He packs their things - still amazed Erwin had retained the presence of mind to grab the packs after everything that had happened at the Base - and waits for the tension in the air to subside. 

Finally, Erwin says, “They’re going to be tracking us.” 

Levi shoulders one of the packs and turns to him. “You think they’ll follow us here?” 

“We should assume they’ll find it. Those last two -”

“Yeah,” Levi interrupts, a small shiver crawling down his spine. “I noticed.” 

“I have a few tricks to make it more difficult to track us,” Erwin says, and heads out. Levi follows him. 

It’s strange, how easily they follow one another. How natural it is for Levi to offer Erwin his trust, his faith, even his  _ obedience _ , and to have Erwin return it. 

It makes something warm and possessive curl around Levi’s rib cage, hot and inescapable in his chest, and he tries desperately to put it away.

They walk for hours in silence. Erwin leads them in circles, through rivers,  up creeks and down them again.

The forest is strikingly beautiful. Levi still can’t get over the  _ cleanliness _ of it, the purity of the air. Even the dirt smells good.

It’s been weeks since he’s seen a road, and nearly a year since he’s seen a city, and he’s hardly even noticed. 

The forest here is thick, so that the sunlight barely even makes it to the ground, and the leaves are dark and lovely and smell like water. The air where they walk feels clean and blue, and when Levi looks up to watch a bird he sees the warm orange light of the sun near the tree tops. 

It’s like being inside an abstract painting, the air layers of color: white, yellow, orange, blue. Levi takes a breath for the thousandth time, oddly grateful for this, and Erwin looks over at him. 

“Are you alright?” 

Levi nods. “Why do you always ask me that?” 

Erwin shrugs. “I. Need to know.” 

“I’m always alright.” 

Erwin’s boots crunch pleasantly over the floor of the forest; Levi hears them brush against little green plants and snap tiny twigs and he feels himself relax more than he has all day. The sounds Erwin makes are comforting and ... nice, somehow. Like the fact that he’s alive, the mark he leaves on the world, is inherently lovely. 

Levi is utterly silent when he walks. 

“Right,” Erwin says, soft. “Except when you’re not.” 

Levi doesn’t know what to say to that, so he says nothing. The birds sing strange little songs, things Levi has never heard before, and he wonders how much the earth will change now. 

They walk for a long time before they find a house - small, with half of the roof missing - and settle into it for the night. Levi puts their packs in a corner of the living room and Erwin sits at the kitchen table to fiddle with their radio and it all feels - strange. Close. Domestic.

It would be so easy like this, to walk over and sit next to him and put a hand against his back, his shoulders, his warm neck. To climb into his lap. The house is so small.

Levi’s palms itch when he thinks about it and it makes him feel trapped, cornered,  _ nervous _ , so he starts clearing the large pieces of the ceiling out of the center of the floor. 

Erwin cracks half a smile at him when he sees Levi cleaning. His hands are steady, tinkling carefully with the radio, and Levi cannot help but picture the way they had held his hips  _ so tightly _ the night before. 

The whole thing feels like a dream, like something he made up. He cannot reconcile the utter impossibility of Erwin ever wanting him with the inevitable memory of his mouth around Levi’s cock, and he’s almost convinced himself he’d imagined it. Levi falls back into the habit of keeping his distance and simply looking at Erwin, aching. 

It’s what he’s used to, what he’s good at.

The distance is grounding, welcome. He had felt distinctly untethered when Erwin had touched him, and it had left a dreamy, intangible quality to the whole experience. He feels like he hasn’t been quite real for hours, and only now, standing across the room under a half-crumpled roof and aching all the way to his spine just from looking at Erwin’s hands, is he real again. 

He scrubs the floorboards next, and Erwin starts a fire in the fireplace. Levi turns his eyes from the way Erwin’s forearms shift when he works, the little furrow of concentration on his face. The previous night is so distant now, certainly a dream. 

After the floorboards Levi finds a broom and sweeps  _ everything _ , feeling almost unhinged, obsessive. 

There is a little bedroom, he discovers while he cleans, hidden by the fallen beams of the ceiling. And there is an actual bed, dusted with pollen and dirt and splinters. Levi hasn’t even seen a bed in a year. The few empty houses he’d been in before had all been gutted.

He almost hesitates to call Erwin over, as if simply standing in the room and looking at the bed with him will bring back everything Levi has carefully avoided thinking of since that morning. He is so sure, however, that he imagined it - the touching, along with the blood, the truly obscene amount of blood, and the swords, and the grenades, it all seems like a vivid nightmare - that he shoves it aside and says softly, “Erwin.”

The house is quiet except for distant bird song and the rustle of leaves, and the shock that runs through Levi’s body when he speaks Erwin’s name tells him that he hadn’t dreamt a single moment of the night before. 

Levi flushes, hot and prickling all the way up his throat, and Erwin  _ doesn’t hear him  _ and he has to say his name  _ again _ \- 

He can hardly say it, like this, staring at the bed, thinking of the way he’d said it over and over again in the cave the night before, the way he’d gasped it out when he -

“Erwin.” 

His voice cracks, and it’s so horribly telling and vulnerable, and Levi prays it goes unnoticed. Erwin turns, and there’s pink over his cheekbones and the base of his throat. 

Hadn’t gone unnoticed, then. 

Erwin clears his throat, but doesn’t stand. “Yes?” 

“There’s, uh.” Levi shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “There’s a place to sleep.” 

Erwin raises his eyebrows and grins, looks genuinely pleased. He still doesn’t get up. 

“That’s good. That’s uh, that’s great.”

Levi doesn’t know what else to say, so he turns his back and goes to their packs. He pulls out food: rice and beans, water, a pot. Something close to excitement burns in his stomach at the thought of cooking under a roof, sleeping in a bed. It’s been so long, and Erwin - 

He’s never seen Erwin like this, inside a house. There’s something strange about it, like trying to cage the sun. Erwin doesn’t  _ belong  _ inside a house; he’s too big, too gold, too much like summer and the smell of rushing water. 

But still, it makes some sad, distant thing curl up in Levi’s chest and he thinks about what it could have been like, if not for the end of the world: coming home to this, to him. To Erwin’s long fingers fiddling with the radio and Erwin’s coat hung up next to the door and Erwin wiping his feet before coming inside, to Erwin’s bright gold hairs on their pillows, to last night’s tea cups sitting cold on the counter because they’d had to  _ touch  _ each other and they’d forgotten -

_ Dangerous.  _

Levi squeezes his eyes shut, biting his tongue to stop the awful flood of images. He cannot have this, he cannot have Erwin. He cannot allow himself to even imagine it. If he does, if he lets himself remember the night before and Erwin’s hands on him and his  _ mouth  _ on him and all those long looks, all the lingering touches, every time his heart stopped beating when Erwin spoke his name - if he lets himself remember those things he will never be able to live without him again. The taste of it the night before had nearly killed him. 

He refuses to let it. He is practiced at protecting himself.

_ Dangerous, Levi _ . 

He cracks his knuckles, starts scrubbing at the floors again. 

Erwin finally gets the radio working again and checks in with Control, tapping out something that Levi is only distantly paying attention to, and Levi nearly scrubs the skin off his hands.   

He cooks. The pot is sturdy and he sets it straight on top of the fire, crouches next to the fireplace and cooks for the first time in longer than he can remember – seared meat and gathered plants notwithstanding.

The spices are the best thing he’s smelled in a long time – he tries not to think about how untrue that is, about the smell of Erwin’s hair and the sweat on the skin of his neck and his breath when he stuttered Levi’s name into his mouth – and he shifts to a more comfortable position on the floor.

Soon the house is filled with the soft, warm smell of the fire and of cooking, and Levi can see the sky in the hole in the roof. The sun has set, and the stars are already out – little spots of brilliance in the deep purple overhead. The fire crackles.

Levi relaxes, forgets for a moment his agonizing struggle to keep his distance from Erwin.

Erwin drops himself onto the floor beside him, sighing.

“Thank you, Levi,” he says softly, so sincere it hurts Levi’s chest.

Levi says nothing and takes the beans and rice off the fire, puts it on the stone in front of the fireplace and stirs it with an ugly wooden spoon. He passes the spoon to Erwin.

“It’s nice,” Erwin says, taking the spoon and tasting the food, “To be under a roof. Eating real food.”

Levi nods, staring into the fire. Erwin’s voice, his nearness, are awful. He feels pulled under, like Erwin is a tide – devastating, enveloping, impossible to fight. He feels himself drowning.

“You regret it,” Erwin murmurs, voice dropped to something careful and soft but undeniably sad. “You regret what happened between us.”

Levi looks sharply over at him. Erwin offers him a small smile and the spoon. He doesn’t take it.

“I –”  _ I don’t. I want it again. I want it more.  _ “I don’t know.”

Erwin is silent for a time, looking Levi in the face with an unbearably tender expression, and then he says, “Are you afraid?”

_ Yes. I’m afraid that if you touch me now, I’ll die when you stop.  _ “Of what?”

“Of me.”

_ Of course I am.  _ “Of course I’m not.” 

Erwin reaches forward then, and Levi cannot help the way he leans into him, the way he sighs when Erwin’s hand touches the side of his neck.

“I don’t regret anything,” Erwin says. His eyes are hard, as if this is a violent declaration.

It is, in a way.

Levi thinks,  _ I regret everything. I regret ever touching you. I regret not touching you every single second we were together. I regret kissing you. I regret not kissing you right now. _

But somehow, none of that is true. 

Levi has never lived his life with regrets, and even though it pains him to so much as  _ look  _ at Erwin, even though Erwin has found all his weakest points, even though he would gut himself with a paring knife just to feel Erwin’s lips on his neck one more time, even though Erwin has utterly  _ destroyed  _ him, he does not regret it. 

Something solid congeals in Levi’s chest. A revelation.

“I don’t regret anything.”

Erwin’s hand slides down Levi’s skin to trace his collarbone and he says, “No?”

Levi shakes his head. He thinks of the careful distance he has kept all day. 

_ Coward _ , he thinks.  _ The damage is already done. He already has you.  _

The fire crackles and the house is so quiet, so small and warm. This is not a place for distance. Levi breathes and does something he has never done before: he tells the whole truth, unprompted.

“I lied, before,” he says, and Erwin tenses, pulls his hand away and simply sits quietly, facing him. The fire lights up half of his face warm and orange and the flame looks perfect in the blue of his irises, like it’s sitting in water.

Levi moves a fraction of an inch closer and lowers his voice.

“I  _ am _ afraid of you.”

Erwin is so still Levi cannot even see him breathe. Carefully, as if he is picking his way through a minefield, he says, “You know I would never do anyth-”

“I know,” Levi says quickly. “That’s – not what I mean.”

Erwin says nothing else, but shifts so that their knees are touching where they sit.

“I’m afraid,” Levi says, “Because it –  _ hurts _ to be near you.” He gestures to his chest, where his heart squeezes so hard it feels like it will stop beating, and then to his stomach, where there’s a strange unbearable clenching heat. “It hurts here.”

“Levi,” Erwin breathes, and there’s more in it than there should be. 

This time when Levi takes a breath, it shakes. Noticeably.

“Plague,” Levi whispers, thinking of their earlier conversation about Apollo. Erwin’s eyebrows draw together in a wounded, tender expression. He reaches for Levi, and when his fingertips brush the flushed skin of Levi’s throat he looks like he’s in pain.

“I would  _ never _ ,” he says, and before he can finish Levi cuts him off.

“Apollo never spoke a lie,” Levi says, and he feels feverish. His hands are shaking. He wonders briefly if Erwin will understand, but he knows he will. He always does. “Ever. Zeus made him god of truth, and no word that ever left his mouth was a lie.”

_ Please _ , he thinks.  _ If you do this, please mean it. _

Erwin’s hands are shaking too. He squeezes them both into fists over Levi’s chest, then spreads them out and slides them up; painfully slow, over his shoulders, his neck, up to the sides of his jaw. His hands are hot where they hold Levi’s face.

“You –” Erwin cuts himself off, shaking his head, never looking away. His eyes are too full of emotion, and again Levi thinks:  _ too big for this little house.  _ The crickets outside are getting louder. 

“Do you understand?” Erwin asks, and his cheeks are pink, his throat is flushed dark red. His whole body trembles like a drop of rain before it slides off a leaf. “Do you understand that I would kill for you?” His voice is so low it sounds like thunder. “That I would die for you?”

_ Please, don’t – _

“Yes,” Levi says, but the word is too soft and barely comes out.

Erwin abruptly takes his hands off Levi’s face and grabs his hand, presses it to his own chest. Hard.

“Do you feel that?” His heart is pounding. It’s faster than Levi’s.

Levi nods, throat tight with some inexplicable thickness.

“ _ This _ is the truth,” Erwin says, eyes so desperate and vulnerable it is like looking at the cracked-open flesh of a fruit. His heart skips a beat under Levi’s fingers; so alive it makes Levi flush to consider it. So much of Erwin, thundering under Levi’s shaking hands. “If you asked to reach in here and hold this in your hands,” he crushes Levi’s hands closer, as if to open up his own chest, as if to put his beating heart in Levi’s palm, “I would let you.”

He’s whispering now; it seems wrong to speak. Levi’s eyes feel wet, heavy.

“So,” Erwin says, so soft Levi needs to lean in so that he can feel Erwin’s lips against his, making the words. They don’t kiss. Erwin keeps talking.

“Don’t speak to me about plague.” His lips are slick and fever-hot against Levi’s, and the feeling of their mouths touching without kissing is almost too much. Levi is dizzy with it. “I understand already.”

Someone moves and they’re kissing, and it’s different than before. There’s something desperate between them, a feeling of necessity, as if they will both die without this. Erwin’s hands go back to cradling Levi’s face and they’re so  _ big _ , so warm, shaking slightly around Levi’s ears. Levi curls his fists into the fabric of Erwin’s shirt, over his heart.

Erwin pulls away to kiss the side of Levi’s jaw and then he says, so low it vibrates all the way down Levi’s spine, “You  _ terrify  _ me.”

_ Fuck - _

Something breaks.

It’s everything, everything Levi needed to know, everything that needed to be said between them. The last vestige of careful distance shatters like a pane of glass.

Levi whines, unlike any sound he’s ever made before, high and broken and pained. His hands shake violently when he pushes them under Erwin’s shirt, splays them against the broad warmth of his back.

Erwin wrenches Levi’s shirt over his head so fast something in the fabric tears, and then his lips are back at Levi’s throat, his jaw, his ear –

“You terrify me,” he says again, whispered so hot and so low against his ear that it raises goosebumps all the way down Levi’s spine. He says it like a proclamation, like it means something entirely different, because it does. “You terrify me.”

Levi shivers violently despite the warm, close air of the house. He’s never been laid bare like this in all his life. This is unlike anything he has ever known.

“Please,” he says, voice so low he doesn’t recognize it. He watches chills break out on Erwin’s exposed chest, disappear into his shirt. He tugs at it, wants it off so badly he doesn’t even remember how to remove it.

Erwin does it for him and then he’s staring at  _ so much skin  _ his brain short-circuits –

Erwin’s chest is lean and ridiculous, perfect, covered in fine gold hair and littered with scars. He has more scars on his chest than Levi, which surprises him.

One in particular catches Levi’s attention: low on his stomach, near his kidney. A near-perfect circle, with rays like a sun. A bullet hole. It matches the one Levi has on his thigh.

Levi’s fingers skim over it, careful, like a question, and Erwin sucks in a long, loud breath.

“Okay?” Levi asks, and Erwin nods. Levi leans forward and presses his lips to it, and Erwin’s skin is so warm and smells so good and the scar is raised and rough but it’s  _ Erwin _ , and so Levi cannot help the sound he makes.

Erwin lets out the breath he’s been holding and then grabs Levi’s hair and wrenches him up to kiss him on the mouth again, utterly devastating. Worse than before; devouring, so desperate it feels like the ground is going to open up and swallow them both. 

It is as if they no longer need to be careful with one another; the way Erwin kisses him is almost violent, completely undone. Wrecked. If it were anyone else Levi would be embarrassed by the desperation, the shattered  _ certainty _ in it. But it’s not.

“Bed,” Levi says, panting. Erwin’s hands are all over him. “There’s a bed.”

Erwin nods, but then he pauses and says, “I want to see you first.”

Levi is still panting, catching his breath. He pushes his hair out of his over-heated face. “What?”

Erwin gestures to the fire. “This is the only place I can see you. Clearly.”

Levi doesn’t understand, but then Erwin is pushing him backwards until his back hits the floorboards, spreading him out on the ground next to the fireplace, yanking his pants down with a sort of ruthlessness that seems to surprise them both.

“Wait,” Levi says, breathless, lying on the floor on his back in his underwear. He’s so hard even the change in pressure from his pants coming off is a relief. “I’m not gonna be the only one –”

Erwin laughs, kneeling over him, and unceremoniously takes off his pants and flings them into the middle of the room. The fire is so good to him, so warm on his gold skin. He looks utterly unreal, like a statue. Like the idea of the sun.

Levi barks a laugh too, unable to stop himself. He shakes his head and reaches for Erwin’s boxers 

“Ridiculous,” he mutters, fingers hooking warmly under the waistband. “Ridiculous.” 

Erwin smiles and it knocks the breath right out of Levi’s chest.

“What?”

Levi shakes his head and pulls Erwin’s boxers off like they’ve offended him, and Erwin’s cock nearly hits him in the face.

“What the  _ fuck –” _

Erwin bursts out laughing at the expression on Levi’s face, and Levi scowls at him. Erwin laughs so hard his whole beautiful body shakes, and some of the desperate tension in the air eases for a moment. Levi shakes his head, gestures at Erwin’s cock.

“Should have known,” he mutters. Erwin smiles again and then it trails off, falls off his face slowly and then all at once, the same way the sun sets. His face looks intent and focused again when he reaches for Levi.

He doesn’t strip him right away; he leaves Levi’s underwear on and pushes at his chest until he’s got his back to the floor again, and runs his hands from Levi’s neck all the way down his torso. His touch is so hot Levi squirms, breathless.

“God,” Erwin says, voice so soft it’s barely there. He’s kneeling over Levi with an expression so rapt it looks like he isn’t even breathing, utterly naked and warm and orange in the light of the fire. His hands are hot and slow down Levi’s sides, and they stop at the muscle over his hips.

“Fucking extraordinary,” Erwin breathes, and the curse shocks down Levi’s spine and raises chills down his arms and legs. He feels so exposed like this, spread out on the floor with Erwin kneeling over him. His skin is too hot; he wants to jump out of it and burrow into Erwin’s instead.

“Jesus, Erwin, are you ever going to get me naked or –”

“Hush,” Erwin says softly, fingers still dipping into the divots of Levi’s hips. He can’t seem to stop touching. “I’ve never seen someone so beautiful,” he says, and Levi flushes all the way from his cheeks to his chest.

_ That’s not – _

“You are,” Erwin says, as if he can read it on Levi’s face. “Christ, you fucking are.”

Levi turns his face into his arm to hide it – he can feel the red of his blush creeping up to his cheekbones and down to his nipples – and Erwin chooses that moment to pull his underwear off him and throw them onto the dining room table.

“Jesus,” Erwin murmurs. His hands hover over Levi’s body like he doesn’t know what to touch first. He looks like he’s seen the face of God.

Levi can’t take it anymore, can’t take being looked at like this, and he goes to roll over and get up, to pull Erwin into the room where there’s a  _ bed  _ and it’s too dark for Erwin to sit here and stare like he’s  _ worshipping  _ him and –

“Oh, please don’t –”

Erwin’s big warm hands stop him moving, grip his hips and then pull him forward, so that Levi’s pulled into his lap and he wraps his legs around Erwin and he’s  _ never _ been looked at like this, and they’re both  _ so naked  _ and Erwin’s skin is so warm and –

Levi shudders when Erwin’s hands move from his hips to his back, picking him up off the floor and pulling Levi to him so they’re chest to chest and _Jesus Christ_ how can one person’s skin be so hot, he feels so naked, the touch of Erwin’s naked chest to his makes his whole body flush.

They’re too close; Levi’s sitting in Erwin’s lap with his legs wrapped around him and Erwin’s huge hands are crushing them together and their  _ cocks  _ are barely an inch from each other, Levi can feel the soft skin of Erwin’s against his stomach, impossibly hard and twitching in time with his pounding heart –

Levi says, “Jesus,” and it comes out lower than anything he’s ever said before. He feels the chills it gives Erwin against his own chest, wraps his arms around him and feels them down Erwin’s spine. He buries his face in the side of Erwin’s neck and breathes, whole body millimeters from breaking into a thousand pieces. “Jesus  _ fucking  _ Christ.”

“Levi,” Erwin gasps, quiet and  _ reverent,  _ and it’s too much like this. He can  _ feel  _ it, he can feel the way his name bounces around inside Erwin’s chest right before it comes out of his mouth, he can feel the warmth of it when Erwin says it against his ear.

_ He has you _ , Levi thinks, delirious.

“ _ Levi _ -”

He’s dying. He’s gasping into Erwin’s neck, whole body so hot he fears he’ll burn down the whole house just from the sound of his own name. 

It occurs to him distantly how strange this is, how utterly devastated he is by Erwin’s proximity, his smell, the way he says his name. How he feels half an inch from coming just from the feeling of the long length of Erwin’s naked body pressed against him -

“Please,” Levi says, and again the word raises chills up Erwin’s arms, “Please let me take you to bed.”

Erwin huffs a breath against Levi’s hair and his hands tighten around him, hard enough to bruise. His cock twitches where it’s trapped between their bellies.

“Christ,” Erwin says, barely loud enough to hear, and the breathlessness in his voice sends a shock of heat all the way to Levi’s toes. “Say that again.”

Levi’s lips twitch and he says, “Please,” then kisses Erwin’s ear, “let me  _ take _ you,” and he kisses Erwin’s jaw, “to bed.” 

Erwin’s head thumps down onto Levi’s shoulder like he can’t hold it up anymore and his hands squeeze themselves into fists. He shudders and Levi feels it roll through his whole body.

If they keep this up they’re going to fuck on the floor in front of the fire when there’s a perfectly good bed 20 feet away, so Levi finally unwinds himself from Erwin and walks stark naked into the bedroom. 

He turns when Erwin doesn’t follow him to find Erwin kneeling naked next to the fire with his mouth open, staring at him with more heat than Levi’s ever witnessed in a person. 

“You have wings on your back,” Erwin says, and his voice stutters as if it causes him pain. 

Levi shrugs, nods. The tattoos wrap around the tops of his shoulders too, taper off down his sides. He’d gotten nearly all of it in one sitting, and he still remembers how his entire back had been one swollen mess of pain for days. 

“They’re -” Erwin clears his throat. “They’re  _ gorgeous _ .” 

A tingle of pleasure shoots from the crown of Levi’s head to the base of his spine. He shakes it off and shrugs one shoulder, trying for nonchalance and missing it by a mile.

“Are you coming?” Levi asks, dropping his voice, and Erwin’s expression melts from dazed awe to a slow, clever smile. 

“Mm.” 

Levi scoffs. Erwin gets up and follows Levi into the room. 

It’s surprisingly intact, Levi guesses it’s far enough off the path that no one has yet had the opportunity to loot it.

The bed, though dusty and abandoned- Levi had of course cleaned it off immediately - isn’t the only thing in the room. There’s a bookshelf, a few books, and a bedside table. Levi points to it as Erwin walks in. 

“What do you think the chances are that there are apocalypse-ready condoms and lube in here?” 

Erwin laughs so hard he leans against the doorway, but the effect is entirely ruined by the fact that he’s naked.

The moonlight through the open window makes his skin and hair look silver. It’s strange on him, too cold somehow. Still, it’s so beautiful it makes Levi’s heart slow to almost nothing. 

“Well,” he says, still leaning against the doorframe, still naked, still  _ absurdly _ hard, “As far as condoms are concerned, I haven’t had anyone in nearly 2 years. And everything was fine then.” 

Levi flushes down his chest at the way Erwin says  _ had anyone. _ It implies a sort of ... dominance that Levi is equal parts captivated and discomfited by.  _ Had anyone _ . He shivers. 

“Me, uh,” he clears his throat. “Me too.” 

_ Had anyone _ -

He wonders how Erwin intends to  _ have _ him, and he flushes so deeply it makes his ears ring. 

“Lovely,” Erwin murmurs under his breath from the doorway, and then he walks into the room and touches the back of Levi’s neck. 

Erwin nods to the open window, to the cold silver moonlight. “Suits you,” he says, and Levi has to clench his fist to keep from hiding his face. He scoffs again, but his breathing is too uneven. 

Erwin’s eyes light up. “I have an idea,” he says, and then he disappears. 

Levi has barely a second to try and collect the forest fire his thoughts have turned into before Erwin is back with a bottle of cooking oil, grinning. 

“Kitchen,” he says. Levi makes a face.

“Disgusting.” 

Erwin shrugs and puts it on the bedside table, then turns and picks Levi up. Levi makes an embarrassingly high sound in surprise, then wraps his legs around Erwin and rolls his eyes. 

“Bastard,” he says, but his cock is so hard he can feel his heartbeat in it, even with the interruption. 

Erwin grins against his skin, kisses the hollow of his throat. “You are much heavier than I expected.” 

Levi shrugs. “Muscle’s heavy,” he says shortly. Erwin looks him over with a fond, searing expression.

Erwin walks them back into the wall and puts one hand against it, the other hand still holding Levi. Levi huffs even as he pushes his hips forward against Erwin’s.

“What is it with you and walls-”

He cuts himself off with a sharp, loud gasp when Erwin bends his head and sets his teeth on Levi’s nipple, a touch too hard to be gentle.

“ _ Fuck _ -”

Levi sinks his fingers into Erwin’s hair and pulls hard in retaliation, perhaps too hard, and then Erwin leans heavily against him and his knees shake. 

“Oh, shit.” 

Not too hard, then. 

He does it again, just to test it, pulls until Erwin’s head is forced back and he’s baring his naked throat to Levi like an animal, and when Levi sets his teeth against the skin there Erwin nearly collapses to the ground.

The revelation makes Levi’s head spin. When he speaks, his voice is so low it sounds more like a roll of thunder than anything else. 

“Don’t fuck me like this, come on.” He gestures to the bed. 

Erwin’s shaking, there’s a blush on his face that almost certainly hadn’t been there before, and he looks almost  _ shy _ when puts Levi down, steps back and sits on the bed and says, “I - I don’t - I want you to -”

Levi’s whole body flushes and he has to grip the edge of the bedside table to keep from stumbling. 

“You want me to fuck you?”

Erwin nods. “It’s all I’ve been able to think about.”

Levi thinks of the Base, of the way Erwin had covered him, of following him blindly through the woods for hours. He thinks of the easy  _ faith  _ and trust he has always put in him, since they met. He thinks of Erwin’s huge, warm hands tracing all his tattoos.  _ He has you _ , Levi thinks, looking at the silver light on the soft hairs falling in Erwin’s eyes.  _ He has you. _

Then he remembers the look of utter devotion on Erwin’s face when he’d had Levi’s cock down his throat, the way he’d crumpled when Levi had said his name, had said  _ Please _ , looks at the way Erwin is blushing and shaking even now, and thinks,  _ But you have him, too. _

Levi’s chest does something strange that feels like expanding and contracting at once, and he climbs into Erwin’s lap so fast it makes him faint. He  _ needs  _ this; he can feel it under his ribs. Pounding through his stomach, his shaking fingers, the soles of his feet. He needs this.

Erwin gasps and puts both hands around Levi and crushes their bodies together. He buries his face in Levi’s neck and makes a sound like a sob. He sounds like he’s going to shatter.

Levi pushes his fingers into Erwin’s hair and kisses the side of his face, softer than anything he’s ever done to anyone. They are both shaking. The moonlight is dizzyingly bright, silver and cool like water. He can see every scar, every twitch and roll of Erwin’s body. He has a tattoo on his shoulder, a sword and two crossed arrows. There are words there, but Levi can’t see them.

“Turn over,” Levi says into his ear, soft and low. He watches the chills crawl down the side of Erwin’s neck and over his shoulder, then fade.

Erwin holds Levi tighter and says, “I – I want –”

“I know,” Levi interrupts, voice still so soft he hardly recognizes it. “Just for now.”

He wants to touch him, to look at him. Levi knows this somehow.

Erwin turns and spreads himself out on the bed. Levi’s chest seizes up at the same time his cock twitches so hard it hurts.

His back is beautiful, so perfect it seems like it isn’t real, with the other side of the bullet hole near his kidney. There are a few other scars but they’re faint, light. His whole body is so ridiculously flawless it causes Levi physical pain – his  _ ass _ is especially absurd. The tattoo on his shoulder says –

“ De Oppresso Liber,” Levi whispers, running his fingers over it.  _ To liberate the oppressed _ .

“Please,” Erwin says, voice somehow impossibly lower. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

Levi runs his hands all the way down Erwin’s back and watches his whole body shiver, then pulls his hips up so he’s on his knees. He bends down and kisses the small of Erwin’s back, moves his hand from where it grips his hips and runs a single finger up the underside of his ridiculous cock.

Erwin jerks, swears and drops his head onto the pillow. Levi can’t help the little smile that pulls at his mouth. His chest feels like it’s going to explode, itchy and hot with something strangely like affection but  _ worse _ , more, utterly devastating and  _ painful  _ –

Levi grabs the oil on the table and settles back onto his knees, spreads Erwin open and runs a finger over him, murmurs, “I can’t believe you found this in the kitchen.”

Erwin makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a whimper. Levi keeps touching him without pushing inside, and he can tell by the set of Erwin’s shoulders that it’s making him insane.

“It’s disgusting, Erwin, honestly.”

Erwin’s shoulders tremble at that and he exhales shakily into the mattress then says, very soft and very low, “Tell me.”

Levi feels one moment of mild confusion before his whole body flushes with disbelieving heat.

“Tell you?” he asks, setting one slick finger against Erwin’s hole and pushing with the slightest pressure. Erwin makes a sound that Levi can’t put a name to without getting religious. “Tell you what, how ridiculous it is that we’re using something people used to  _ cook  _ with for this?”

Erwin huffs half a laugh.

“Honestly, Erwin, how desperate do you have to be?” Levi asks, and Erwin swallows audibly.

Levi pushes a bit more, works his finger in to the first knuckle and lowers his voice when he says, “You want me to tell you how  _ filthy _ this is, how dirty it’s going to make you?”

Erwin’s knees shake and he makes a broken sound. Levi pushes further, wraps his other hand around Erwin’s cock and finds that he’s leaking all over the bed.

“How dirty it’s going to make  _ me _ when I fuck you?”

“ _ Fuck –” _

Levi is so dizzy he leans his whole chest against Erwin’s back and adds another slick finger next to the first. At the press of both of them Erwin’s whole body shakes and Levi watches over his shoulder when he bites the pillow under him. 

Levi has no idea how much time passes. He is utterly mesmerized by the tense shaking of the muscles in Erwin’s neck, by the broken-open sounds coming out of his mouth, by the suffocating, searing heat of him around Levi’s fingers.

He’s got three easily inside him when he crooks them and watches Erwin’s beautiful back arch almost painfully, a sound wrenched from his mouth that goes straight to Levi’s nearly forgotten cock.

He does it again, brushes his fingers over the same spot, gentle the first time and almost  _ cruelly _ firm the second, and Erwin’s voice actually cracks when he moans.

“ _ Levi _ .”

He’s panting, gasping, his voice utterly wrecked. There’s sweat down the back of his neck and between his shoulder blades, and when Levi leans forward to kiss his ear and the side of his head he smells it in his hair.

“Please,” Erwin says, and it’s the first time he’s said it like this. It shocks straight through Levi’s whole body like a lightning strike. “Please,  _ please _ , I can’t take it,  _ please  _ –”

Levi is shushing him before he really realizes it, easing his fingers out and running a hand down the shaking muscles of Erwin’s back. Erwin makes a sound very much like a sob. The whole back of his neck is dark red, and Levi suddenly desperately wants to see the flush all down his front.

He turns Erwin over with one hand on his shoulder, barely has to touch him and he’s scrambling onto his back like he’s been waiting his entire life to do it.

When Levi reaches for the oil again – he can’t suppress a shudder, and even with the way he’s open-mouthed and panting and sweating Erwin still grins just a little at that – Erwin’s eyes follow every single motion of his hands like his life depends on them. Levi makes a sound low in his throat when he slicks up his cock and Erwin closes his eyes and leans his head back on the bed like he can’t take it.

“Can’t believe you made me this dirty,” Levi says under his breath, mostly an honest complaint, but Erwin flushes all the way down his chest. Levi adds, “Can you feel it? Inside you? How good I stretched you open for this?”

Erwin’s eyes open and he looks at Levi like he can’t believe any of this is happening. It seems a great effort for him to speak.

Levi leans forward and pushes Erwin’s legs up and apart, presses two fingers back inside him, slow and deep, and says, “Can you feel how slick I made you? Hm?”

Erwin bites his lip and honest-to-god  _ whines _ , hands reaching for Levi’s cock, and Levi pushes them away just to watch the way it makes Erwin blush.

“Look at you. Fuck.”

“ _ Levi _ –”

“Oh, you want me to fuck you?”

Erwin almost laughs, but he’s so red and his cock is  _ so  _ hard against his stomach that it’s almost purple, leaking all over him. “ _ Bastard _ ,” he breathes. “Please.”

“Well, alright,” Levi says, feeling half a smile curling at the corners of his lips as he lines himself up and pushes forward just a little. Erwin squirms perfectly. It’s intoxicating, having so much beautiful gold muscle  _ squirming  _ and  _ whining _ for him like this. Levi has to take a breath to steady himself before he pushes all the way in.

It’s –

“ _ Jesus  _ motherfucking shitchrist,” Levi murmurs, soft and almost to himself. “Fuck, holy  _ fucking _ shit, oh my –”

_ So  _ tight he can’t  _ breathe – _

“What the  _ fuck _ , Erwin, Jesus fuck, you’re – fuck, you’re so –”

He can’t think, he can’t stop  _ talking _ , and he can’t stop  _ touching _ ; he’s crushing them together without even thinking about it, burying his face in the hollow of Erwin’s throat and bruising his back and his hips where he holds him, fucking Erwin like a goddamn animal, no control, no finesse, nothing –

Erwin shifts his hips just a little and then he screams, so loud it makes Levi’s ears buzz, digging his fingers into the skin of Levi’s back until the pain is bright and sharp and he can  _ taste  _ it, it’s right there, perfect brilliant red points of pain in the wake of Erwin’s fingers, and someone is still  _ talking _ –

“-you like this, fuck, you have no idea, you feel so  _ fucking –  _ I can’t – what are you –  _ Jesus _ , yes, fucking  _ God  _ I want to fucking  _ live inside you _ –”

It doesn’t matter that it’s him, it doesn’t matter that he can’t stop the flood of words and it doesn’t matter that Erwin’s fingernails on his back are drawing blood and it doesn’t matter that the bed is –

Breaking, the old wood of the bedframe shatters and the bottom half of the bed crashes to the ground and they don’t even notice, Levi couldn’t stop fucking him if the world was ending –

But the world  _ is  _ ending, it  _ did  _ end and Erwin  _ still gave him this  _ -

“—can’t believe you, can’t – oh, oh  _ fuck _ , you’re so  _ fucking tight _ –”

Erwin makes a sound that sounds like something half between Levi’s name and the desperate, keening groan of an animal and Levi reaches between them and gets a hand around Erwin’s cock. The skin over it is so soft, so warm, and Levi’s hand is still slick from that  _ goddamned oil  _ and it’s so easy, it’s so easy to feel all of him like this, and he’s leaking all over Levi’s knuckles and Levi can hardly stand it, he’s going to crawl out of his own skin and into Erwin’s –

“Jesus Christ I – God, I wish you could – oh, my god, I wish you could feel yourself –”

He bites Erwin’s collarbone so hard that it hurts his teeth, a hot, immovable press of possessiveness taking hold of his chest, and Erwin’s voice when he comes is the most unreal thing Levi has ever heard in his entire life.

He pulls back just a little just so he can watch it on Erwin’s face; the little twitch on his brow almost like confusion, the wet, gasping stretch of his mouth when he moans that last time, the way his eyes screw up tight.

It’s stunning. It’s so stunning that Levi nearly dies, thinks for a second that he’s dying from the way Erwin’s hole seizes around him when he comes, from the way he spills all over Levi’s fingers and between their stomachs, from the way Erwin’s mouth looks –

“ _ Erw-” _

He doesn’t finish speaking because he’s silent when he comes, always completely silent, ears ringing and chest bursting with it. He shakes with his mouth open against Erwin’s chest as he fills him up and the thought of it is so devastating that he wonders if he’ll ever  _ stop  _ –

Finally, finally, he comes down, panting and sweaty and feeling positively disgusting. Erwin sounds like he’s run a marathon. He laughs, and it dissolves into a gasp and a hiss when Levi eases his cock out.

“Well.” Levi can’t bring himself to get off Erwin’s chest. He’s so tired.

“Mm.” Erwin just wraps his arms around him. His heart is pounding; Levi can practically feel it against his ear.

“We are disgusting.”

Erwin laughs again, kisses Levi’s hair, then pulls him up and kisses his mouth. It’s different again; slow this time, easy. Languid and wonderful. Levi sighs.

“I need a bath.”

Erwin waves a hand and then wraps it around Levi again. “Later.” 

He’s asleep before he realizes it, and doesn’t dream. 

When he wakes, it is to the soft yellow light of early morning, and to an empty bed. He’s too sleepy to register it at first, then panic hits him full in the ribs and he runs into the kitchen stark naked, come still stuck to his stomach and chest. There’s a note on the kitchen table, along with the radio. 

_ Hey,  _

_ Went to get firewood. Be back in five minutes.  _

_ E _

Levi relaxes as he takes in the little house in the morning: soft, quiet, close. Erwin’s jacket is hanging from a nail on the wall. He stretches, yawns, thinks of making breakfast. They’re making good time. They might make it to Control before -

A gunshot echoes through the woods. 

Levi freezes, cold, mind-numbing panic holding him utterly still. He waits for other sounds: Erwin yelling that he’s alright, Erwin coming through the door with a rabbit, Erwin cursing. 

There’s nothing. 

Levi takes two full, earth-shatteringly terrified seconds to simply stand in the little kitchen and shake, and then he’s throwing on his clothes and running -  _ running _ \- out into the woods. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ho boy now what
> 
> come see me at francisthegreat.tumblr.com


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Ackerman is out for blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took SO LONG to get to you guys. TW for a lot of violence and panic attacks.

 

Levi’s feet take him toward the sound before he realizes anything about the situation, and his fist clenches empty and impotent by his side. He’s got no weapons. And someone - he prays it’s Erwin, but isn’t hopeful - has a gun.

There have been five times in Levi’s life when he’s gone up against a gun in close quarters. All five of them were not instances he is willing to repeat.

Movement to his left draws his eye and he’s there in seconds, looking down at a trembling, sick-looking man bleeding from a hole in his stomach.

The man is wheezing, grabbing his stomach over and over again like he isn’t sure he’s holding it. Levi’s own stomach flips over at the familiarity that pulls at him at the motion.

A memory bubbles to the surface of his mind like a pool of blood, and Levi sees himself standing over an arms dealer in a broken-down warehouse with a gun in each hand, watching him gurgle and clutch at his gut in something so like confusion -

He remembers Erwin. He shakes himself.

“What happened.”

His voice is flat, low, deadly. The man on the ground shivers, and Levi knows he is lucid enough to understand.

He sets his heel against the back of the man’s hand, where it cradles his bullet wound, and pushes. The man howls like an animal.

“What. Happened.”

Yellow, half-crazed eyes meet Levi’s. The man says, “They left. They left me.”

Levi’s teeth are clenched so hard he wonders when they’ll shatter in his skull. His heel digs into the man’s hand until it cuts a little half moon of blood into it.

“Where.”

But the man simply says, “They left me, they left,” over and over again, like he can’t believe it. Levi crouches down in the dirt and looks at him.

His hair has only just started to fall out, his eyes yellowed and bloodshot. He looks feverish and pale at the same time, sweating and shaking from the pain and the blood loss. Levi feels nothing but hate for him. His panic and rage are so bright they’re like a knife: sharp, pointed, focused only on one question.

“ _Where_ is he.”

He can’t say Erwin’s name.

The man’s expression is far away, glazed over. Levi takes the man’s hands off his stomach and hits him there, once, very hard. His ears are ringing. It has been so long since he deliberately tortured someone in this way. His fist is carefully placed, whip-fast. He slams it into the soft bruised flesh of the solar plexus, then once again into bullet-hole.

His fist is sprayed with a fine mist of blood.

The man screams. Levi holds up a fist, threatens to do it again.

“We - we we were just supposed to f-follow you,” the man says, stuttering but lucid from the pain. “Got hungry.”

Levi’s blood freezes in his veins.

“What did you do to him.”

“They sa-said not to but - but we were _so hungry_ -” the man’s scabbed, bloody hands grip Levi’s wrist, shockingly strong. “Took him home. Gonna b-be in trouble but. We’re so hungry and - and he shot - shot me. They left me.”

_Took him home._

Levi reaches forward and presses the heel of his hand against the bullet wound and the blood is so warm, there’s so much of it, and it’s just like his nightmares, so dark red it’s almost black against his skin, swallowing his fingers, the back of his palm, his wrist -

“Where is he?”

The man is whimpering now, like a wounded dog. He says very softly, “Kill me, please kill me.”

Levi doesn’t recognize his own voice when he says, “Not until you tell me where he is.”

The man’s bloody hand points off to Levi’s left, up a low mountainside. Now that he’s looking for it he can see the tiny grey ribbon of smoke from a fire, set high up on the hill.

He can hardly bring himself to ask what he needs to ask, but he does it through clenched teeth:

“Is he alive?”

The man nods. “Gotta cook it first, otherwise it makes you sick faster.”

Levi’s stomach heaves and he stands so fast the man doesn’t even have time to watch, brings the heel of his foot to the man’s temple and kicks him with all of his weight.

The man stops moving. Levi doesn’t stop until his foot touches the ground, the skull giving finally and cracking, then shattering in the shape of his heel like a glass window.

The sound is awful, and so is the smell and the feeling of the skull breaking under him, but it’s nothing compared to the fear searing Levi’s insides.

They don’t have much of a head-start, but Levi still has to go back to the cabin. He makes it there in minutes, stomach twisting at the sight of Erwin’s jacket, his pack by the door.

Something about the jacket slams his heart against his ribcage so hard he’s sure it’s bruised, painful and lopsided and aching for Erwin. Levi’s breath catches, cold in his chest. He stops and closes his eyes, feeling the buzzing of insects, the motes of dust floating in the sunlight of the little kitchen.

He takes a deep breath and goes to the pack of weapons.

His sword is laying on the ground next to the pack, forgotten, and Levi has a brief, painful flash of memory of the night before: of picking it up to sharpen it, his nightly ritual, and then putting it down in favor of Erwin and the fire and the talk of Apollo and plague -

He picks it up now, fingers tightening on the hilt. In his pockets he puts two small knives, and then straps a handgun to his back and another under his arm. The pack holds more weapons than Levi realizes until they’re nearly all on his person.

Erwin had packed an armory.

Levi turns with his fists and teeth clenched, knuckles white on the sword, guns and ammunition strapped to his torso. His rage is strange and settled in his chest, like a loaded gun: cocked, heavy, but unfired.

He’s saving it. He’s not sure what for yet.

The smoke is a beacon and a reminder: he follows it like an arrow but can’t shake the understanding of what it is _for_ from his mind.

_Gotta cook it first otherwise it makes you sick faster-_

He gets to the camp so fast it surprises him. He’d had no idea if he was walking or running, had no awareness of his body beyond the beating of his heart and and the stretch of blood on his right fist. Now, he slams back into his body like the magazine of a gun.

The camp is small, smaller than he had feared, and the fire that birthed the smoke that led him here is commanding the attention of most of the cannibals present.

They seem to be fighting: all in varying states of sickness and lucidity, some yelling full sentences and others just grunting and grabbing for each other. Levi strains his ears, crouching behind a tree on the edge of camp. They’re arguing over how long to cook someth-

Levi’s grip on his sword loosens for a fraction of a second as realization shocks through him, awful and inescapable.

There is a human arm on a spit over the fire.

He knows it, knows exactly all the ways in which that arm has touched his body, shielded him, carried him, _held_ him.

For a long, dizzying moment, Levi feels himself simply - stop. He is in freefall, with only the desire to lay down and let the beautiful green underbrush cover him until he cannot get up anymore.

Then a cough from the other side of camp draws his attention and he looks up, lost, adrift, without even his rage to warm him-

Erwin’s slumped on the ground across the camp, pale and - fuck, missing his _arm_ \- but alive.

Alive.

Levi’s relief is a physical thing filling his whole rib cage, and then his rage hits him like a truck.

He goes for the guns first - gets one in each hand with his sword at his back - and takes out 10 cannibals through the neck as he closes the distance between them. He fires 16 times, but he isn’t as good a shot as Erwin and he’s seeing red so a few shots don’t quite hit the mark.

The cannibals turn all at once in his direction, some slow and stupid and some ducking for cover. Levi empties both clips and takes down a few more, then switches for his sword and one huge, serrated hunting knife as long as his forearm. It’s long and deadly and he holds it backwards, so that the blade lays flat against the blood-spattered skin of his arm when he points at Erwin.

“Who took his arm?”

One of the cannibals points at a body at Levi’s feet, hand shaking. Levi takes the head off the corpse in one move, then shoves his sword through its heart.

“Who else?”

They scatter then, finally aware that he does not intend to leave any alive.

His sword cuts them open and they spill their insides all over the ground, so hot inside they steam when they hit the cool earth. His knife severs their spinal cords. Their falling bodies and death gurgles blur into one long, disgusting chore, like cleaning the bathroom or taking out the trash.

It’s almost shocking how easy it is to cut them down. Levi kills them indiscriminately, except for the two he’d seen at the fire fighting over Erwin’s arm.

He saves them for last.

They try to run into the woods, but Levi hefts his hunting knife and throws it with a precision he thought he’d lost. It hits one of the cannibals in the arm and pins it to a tree. The other wastes one precious second looking back, at the knife embedded in his friend, then at Levi. By the time he goes to turn away again, Levi is on him.

He lands on the first cannibal and knocks him to the ground, a knee in his back and the other one solid and immovable next to his body.

The second cannibal, the one Levi had nailed to the tree, tries to pull the knife out and fails. Out of the corner of his eye Levi sees him simply pull his arm forward instead, the knife sinking further into his flesh as he moves, pulled through him, huge bloody chunks of him stuck to the tree with the knife. He doesn’t even wince. His face is awful, scabbed and vacant. His mind and his nerves are gone.

Levi knows he will get nothing out of him, so he reaches forward and cuts the tendons of his heels. The cannibal drops with a grunt, and Levi cuts off his head with barely a glance.

He turns back to the first one, knee still in his back.

This one looks far more lucid, sickness not yet spread to his mind. And yet he was _screaming_ for Erwin’s arm. Levi feels a searing stab of rage and slams his sword all the way through the cannibal’s shoulder and into the soft green ground.

The cannibal screams. Levi grins horribly, bloodthirsty, and it cracks open his face like it used to, like splitting open a hollow rock and unleashing a dead disease. He remembers this: this threatening lunacy, this unhinged, violent hatred. It feels like putting on an old coat, stiff and choking, and finding that it still fits. He leans in close.

“If you answer my question I’ll kill you fast,” he murmurs, almost as if he would to a lover. The cannibal turns his head and shoots him a terrified look. His expression is far more lucid than the others. Early stages, then. Which means he can still feel pain.

Levi says, still soft and almost seductive, “If you don’t...” He twists the sword embedded in his shoulder.

“Okay, okay! Yes, anything!”

One hand on the sword, sinking into the soft ground through the man’s flesh, Levi says, “Did you touch him?”

“N-no.”

Levi twists again, pulls the sword toward himself a little until he feels it hit the bone of a vertebrae, shifts so his knee is pressing at the base of the man’s neck.

Levi’s voice is so low when it comes out it’s little more than a vibration, as if he is speaking up through the ground.

“Did. You. Touch him.”

He knows this person is nothing, a foot soldier in the strange, organized chaos the cannibals make. He knows that whoever is running this, whoever put out the order for them to be followed, is the far greater threat. That this man in front of him is not worth his time.

He knows this and yet he cannot stop himself from wringing every possible agonized breath from the man’s lips. It feels _good_ , this all-consuming rage. Almost addictive. He twists the sword again and feels it scrape along the bones of the man’s spine.

“Fine! Yes! I helped cut it off, I was _hungry_!”

He sounds pathetic, whiny like a child, his voice cracking. His eyes are only just beginning to yellow.

Levi’s vision is blurred with red. His whole chest seizes up with it. Every pump of his heart is filled with hate and rage. He wants this thing to _hurt_ , to suffer endlessly for -

“Levi.”

The voice is soft, but clear. Levi leaves his sword embedded in the last cannibal, sticking up out of the ground like a bamboo shoot, and turns toward it.

Erwin is standing, leaning heavily on a short stick like a cane. His face is terribly pale. His arm isn’t bleeding nearly as much as it should be.

Erwin-

_Erwin Erwin Erwin Erwin_ -

Levi’s knees waver when he looks at him. Everything in his whole chest aches, like the fire of his rage has left a deep, raw sear against the insides of his ribs. Every pump of blood hurts his heart.

He goes as if pulled by a magnet, by a preternatural force. He feels like a tide pulled by the moon.

Erwin collapses his weight onto him once Levi gets his shoulder under Erwin’s good arm, and they make slow but steady progress in halting steps, picking over the minefield of cannibal corpses.

Erwin looks over the mess of bodies, some so bloody and mangled they don’t even look human, then turns his face into Levi’s hair and huffs very quietly, “Hi.”

Levi laughs. He can’t help it, it’s a sort of panic response, like a hiccup. It punches out of his chest too loud, over-excited, a hysterical little yelp. He adjusts his arm around Erwin and takes a little more of his weight.

“Hey.”

Suddenly Levi is so exhausted he can hardly stand. It is a singularly draining thing, to be so filled with violence and hatred and to have Erwin so easily leech it away like poison from a wound.

He stumbles, and Erwin’s arm tightens around his shoulders.

He catches him. With one goddamn arm, after everything, after he watched them squabble over _eating him_. He catches Levi.

Levi’s covered in blood up to his elbows again, and he can feel it in sticky awful splotches on his arms, his chest, his face. He feels a terrible sense of deja vu.

It takes a moment for him to remember anything beyond Erwin’s presence next to him, but finally he looks over and says, “Why aren’t you bleeding?”

He should be unconscious. He could be _dead_ with how long it’s been. But instead he’s -

“I cauterized it,” Erwin says, as if it’s nothing. “They dropped a pan in the fire. I used that.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Erwin looks over the camp, eyes still so blue. Levi has no idea how he’s still so lucid.

“There,” he says, and then looks down at the stump of his arm. An awful, hysterical giggle bubbles up in his throat.

“I just tried to - to point,” he says, then giggles again. His face is so pale. “I guess I can’t do that.”

Levi’s chest shrinks down to a painful little seed of hatred for the people who did this.

“Where?” He asks, looking for something else to focus on.

Erwin nods to a tent. “That big tent. They have radios. Walkies. We can probably repurpose them to call Control for help.”

Levi nods, eases Erwin down with a hand on his chest and says, “Stay here.”

Erwin laughs again. Levi hates the sound of it.

“I don’t think I’m going anywhere, Levi.”

Levi can’t look back at him, so he goes to the cannibal on the ground who’s still got his sword sticking out of his chest.

The cannibal is still alive. He’s wheezing. Levi wrenches the sword out of him and he makes a strange, inhuman sound and then says, “They’ll find you.”

Levi wipes off his sword on his bloody shirt. He’s covered in blood again. “Yeah.”

“There’s nowhere for you to hide,” the cannibal says. “Ze-”

Levi shoves his short knife through the cannibal’s neck and severs his spinal cord. He stops talking.

It takes a few moments to find the right tent - some of them are surprisingly well kept and others are closer to _animal dens_ and the differences unnerve Levi - but eventually he finds a stock pile of electronics.

No weapons.

Shit.

He takes everything that looks important or useful and leaves, looks for Erwin and finds him slumped horribly on the ground.

“Erw- shit. Erwin.”

He doesn’t answer. Levi falls to his knees in front of him and slaps him in the face so hard it stings his hand.

“Erwin!”

Erwin’s eyes flicker open like he’s waking from a deep sleep and Levi feels sick with relief.

“Five more minutes,” Erwin mumbles, and closes his eyes again.

“No no no no no -” Levi slaps his face again, gentler this time, four or five times in quick succession. “Erwin. Wake up. Hey. Open your eyes.”

Nothing. Erwin mumbles something else but it sounds like he’s asleep, almost. Levi feels something trapped in his chest trying to claw its way out, a scream or a sob. He’s not sure which.

“Please,” he says, soft. “Please open your eyes, Erwin. Please.”

He touches the horrible cauterized stump of Erwin’s arm and hopes the pain of it will shock him awake, curls his fingers over it and a dizzying, crushing heartbreak seizes his chest-

It works; Erwin makes some sort of awful gasping sound and his eyes shoot open, panicked and wide for one single second. Then they fall on Levi and get cloudy and sleepy again.

“Levi?”

Levi rests his forehead against Erwin’s in reply.

“What are you doing here?”

“What?”

“Levi, what - what’s - Levi, my _arm_ is - where’s my-”

Levi tries to shush him but isn’t sure what to do; he’s never had to handle someone in shock before. It is a strange, devastating kind of pain to see Erwin lose his arm all over again like this.

“It’s okay,” he says, and his hands shake for the first time in - he doesn’t remember how long. Erwin makes an awful noise of panic, like a whine but worse. He’s looking everywhere but Levi, eyes frantic and unseeing. Levi touches his face. “It’s okay, baby.”

_Baby_.

Erwin looks up at him, eyes clearing.

“Levi, I.” He swallows heavily, grips one of Levi’s shoulders. “I think I’m in shock.”

“Yeah.”

“I - oh, my God.”

“Yeah.”

Erwin nods slowly to himself, then whispers very softly, “Can you get me out of here?”

Levi’s heart cracks. He nods. His heart is beating so hard it hurts and he can’t feel his hands and his ears are ringing and there’s this awful - _sense_ \- coming from the woods, the way leaves turn over before a storm, but none of that matters.

He stands up and grips Erwin under the arm, hauls him to his feet and gets himself under him so he’s supporting most of his weight.

“Okay,” he says, mostly to himself. The electronics are in a stolen bag over his other shoulder and they dig into his back, but Erwin’s got his feet under him now.

_One step at a time._

“Okay.”

They make very slow progress, but they do make progress. By nightfall Levi can see the cabin. His shoulders and legs are screaming from carrying 200 pounds of Erwin for so many hours. He’s shaking, covered in blood. Erwin’s breath is frighteningly shallow in his ear.

“Hey,” he says, inching closer to the little house. “Hey, Erwin.”

“Mm.”

“Are you with me?”

Erwin’s voice is soft. “Yeah. Tired. Hurts.”

“We’re almost there.” He adjusts his grip a little and Erwin groans. A pang of panic streaks through his chest: this is bad. They need a doctor. _Now_.

“You’re gonna show me how to set up that radio, right?” he asks, just to keep Erwin talking.

Erwin murmurs, “Yeah.”

“Hey. Open your eyes.”

“They’re open.”

Levi stumbles and catches himself. “You liar.”

Erwin huffs an exhausted laugh. “How’d you know?”

“Just did.”

_I know you._

Fuck, he does. The possibility of actually losing him after all of this, to something as stupid as infection or shock, slams back into Levi’s chest.

They finally make it to the cabin and Levi props Erwin up on the bed, goes to the pack and looks for anything he can use as a bandage. He finds one single roll of gauze and nothing else but knives and gunpowder.

As he wraps Erwin’s shoulder as best he can he tries to keep him awake, but the shock is starting to affect him. He’s shaking. He’s in and out of consciousness. It takes everything in Levi not to break down and shake with him. He has never, in his entire life, been so terrified as this.

Haltingly, with a lot of mistakes, Erwin talks him through connecting the walkie with the radio until it makes a comm system. Levi’s hands shake - again - but he manages the wires in the right places.

From his place propped up on the bed, Erwin whispers, “Did you do it?” His voice is horribly, wrenchingly weak.

Did he do it?

Levi doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t -

His brain is a static of panic and white noise, finally catching up to the fear he’s been shoving off.

He doesn’t -

His voice shakes when he says, “How - I don’t - how can I tell?”

Erwin doesn’t answer.

“Erwin?”

Erwin? Erwin? Erwin? Erwin-

He’s unconscious, slumped on the bed, and Levi is alone.

There is one single, awful moment where everything in his whole mind folds in on itself, replays over and over again useless half-phrases and images like a broken record, and the house is too quiet, it’s too quiet, it’s too quiet, but the woods are _loud_ , they’ve been yelling at him all day, warning him -

_Something is coming, something is coming -_

He’s alone. He’s alone.

No.

He closes his eyes, takes one deep breath and holds it, and listens to Erwin’s breathing.

Shallow, fast. But there.

The radio is already tuned to Control’s frequency. Levi presses down the walkie and prays.

“Control, I need you to come the fuck in _now_.”

Static.

Static on the radio, static in Levi’s head. Static in his fingers and toes, his chest.

“Fuck, this is a fucking - SOS situation, I don’t - ”

A voice crackles over the radio, low and soft.

“Who is this.” Death. It’s Death. Her voice is unmistakable.

“It’s Levi,” Levi says, and then realizes that he’s _never told them his name,_ it was always Erwin, how the fuck is he supposed to -

Breathe.

“I’m with Erwin,” he says, keeping his voice steady. His hands still shake. “He’s hurt. Bad. We need a doctor.”

“Erwin?” Death’s voice sharpens. She shuffles around then says, “How bad?”

“Bad.”

A beat and then Death says, “Hang on.”

Levi breathes. He looks over at Erwin. The house is starting to get very dark, but Levi cannot even contemplate the possibility of leaving Erwin’s side to start a fire.

A new voice, one Levi has never heard before, sounds over the radio.

“Clever rigging a comm system!”

The voice sounds excited, manic. There’s an edge of hysteria to it that raises the hairs on Levi’s arms.

“You said it’s Levi, right?” Hysteria asks.

“Yeah.”

“You’re the person with Erwin?”

“Yeah.”

Hysteria takes a moment and then their voice drops to something almost businesslike. It strangely brings Levi some measure of comfort.

“Tell me what happened.”

Levi scrubs a hand over his face and says, “He got - taken. They took his arm and - fuck, they took his arm.”

“The Titans _ate_ Erwin’s arm?” The voice is back to excited again.

_Titans?_

Hysteria says, almost to themselves, “I wonder if that will affect them at all... Erwin seemed healthy...”

They trail off mumbling about disease progressions and sample variations and Levi interrupts just so they’ll stop.

“Titans?”

Hysteria says, glib, “Oh, that’s just what I call them. Titans of Greek mythology did a lot of eating each other.”

“Oh. Yeah. Anyway, I got him back to the house, but.” Levi breathes, and it’s shaky and unsteady. “He’s not. He’s not awake anymore.”

“Ah. You need to stop the bleeding.”

“Yeah, he um. He handled that already.”

Hysteria hums approvingly and then says, “They’ll be coming for you if you took him from their camp.”

Levi feels his own voice lower. “No they won’t.”

“What?”

“They’re dead.”

Hysteria pauses. “ _All_ of them?”

“Listen, I don’t have time to talk about this. Erwin needs a fucking doctor.” He pauses, then adds, “They’re all dead.”

“I see.” Hysteria sounds almost disappointed, which is insane. “Can you move him?”

Levi looks over at him. He’s bloodlessly pale, the light of the moon through the window making it even worse. His skin looks white. It’s a horrible contrast to the last time they were here.

“No.”

Hysteria makes a considering noise, then says, “He’ll most likely die in around 48 hours without antibiotics.”

The sound that comes out of Levi’s mouth is not human, and then he hears himself growl, “That will _not_ happen.”

“No,” Hysteria agrees. “We’re coming to you. I can help.”

“What?”

“I need to know where you are. Is there anything in that house that can help tell me that?”

Levi looks around. He’s in the little bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed while he tries to imagine Erwin’s just asleep next to him. There is nothing here.

He turns to Erwin and whispers, “Be right back.”

Erwin doesn’t respond.

Levi takes the radio into the kitchen and starts rifling through drawers. They’re mostly empty.

“Levi?”

Hysteria’s strange voice crackles over the radio. Levi ignores it.

“Levi, did you die?” The voice sounds far from concerned. Mostly just curious. Perhaps even a little excited.

Levi grabs the comm for the radio.

“No.”

“Most remote cabins have their GPS coordinates someplace in case of emergencies.”

Levi scowls at the radio. “Yeah, I _figured_ that. I’m fucking looking.”

There’s nothing, and Erwin is dying in the fucking room next to him, and there’s nothing, there’s nothing here, there’s nothing -

“There’s nothing here. There’s nothing here.”

Hysteria responds, but Levi doesn’t hear. His ears are ringing so loud he can’t think. He cannot get the image of Erwin’s flickering eyelids, his horrible white forehead, the cold sweat on his chest out of his mind. The house is so cold, and so dark, and so small. The walls are too close, the doorways are -

The doorway.

There are _coordinates carved over the doorway_.

Levi’s heart squeezes so hard in his chest he doubles over. Hysteria has been speaking, but it doesn’t filter through to his brain until halfway through it.

“-assume you’re dead.”

“I’m not dead,” Levi pants into the comm, short of breath like he’s just run a marathon. His heart won’t slow down. The pads of his fingers are buzzing. He feels like he’s just touched a live wire.

They have _medicine_. And weapons. And now they can get to them.

“I found it.”

“You found it?”

Levi looks up at the numbers. He makes a very tight fist, hands still tacky with blood. Some of it is Erwin’s, and Levi imagines that it feels different than the rest.

“Yeah.”

Hysteria’s voice gets very low and excited. They say something soft away from the radio that Levi can’t pick up. He glances back at Erwin in the bed, pale as Death with nothing but whistling air where his arm should be. Levi's whole body shakes when he looks at him.

He reads off the numbers once, then does it again slower. Hysteria is quiet for a long time.

“Levi?” Hysteria says.

“What.” Levi’s already moving, already going to sit at the foot of the bed, just to rest his hand on Erwin’s foot, just to sit in the same room and hear him breathing. Levi wonders how bad his infection is, how quickly he’s dying.

“Sit tight for an hour,” Hysteria says, and Levi’s heart leaps again. “We’re coming for you.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Apollo’s name is cognate with the Greek verb_ apollesthai _, “to destroy utterly, kill, slay, demolish, lay waste.” ... “Apollon emos” designates the god as “my Apollo” and “my destroyer” at the same time in the same words._
> 
> _\- Anne Carson // Cassandra Float Can_   
>    
> 

 

Levi waits.

He waits, and hates himself.

He can do nothing. He paces the little room, listens to Erwin’s shallow breathing, and waits.

Finally he sits on the edge of the bed and just looks; studies Erwin’s too-pale, too-beautiful face.

“Erwin?”

Still, _still_ , the shock of it rocks through him, a thrill from his chest to the arches of his feet, every time he speaks Erwin’s name. Even now.

It hurts. It always hurts when he says Erwin’s name, when he looks at his face, but now with - with the possibility of -

No.

No. No. No. No.

“Erwin.”

He’s a masochist. He wants to feel it, the terrible zing of pain through his ribs at the sound of the name, like the bones of his chest are conductive, hollow, ringing.

“Erwin, please.”

He’s never begged like this. Never like this, with one foot already out over the void, voice shaking with fear and desperation and something else.

He remembers the last time he begged Erwin for something in this very room and feels something solid lurch forward in his chest. Erwin doesn’t stir, but he doesn’t stop breathing either.

Only six minutes have passed.

Levi lays one shaking hand over Erwin’s ankle and his whole body unclenches, eases open like an oyster with the tide. The warmth of Erwin’s skin under his palm changes his whole physiology. He can feel the shallow, rabbit-like beating of Erwin’s heart. His own slows, just a little.

“I need you to survive,” he says, voice soft. The air is still and smells of wet green leaves and bark. It is beautifully quiet, though Levi doesn’t notice. There are a thousand thousand stars over the hole in the roof.

“Don’t die,” he says, tone suddenly urgent. “I - ”

He knows it’s true but he can’t say it, so instead he says, “I think I need you.”

He curls his fingers a little tighter around Erwin’s ankle. The night is getting cold, but he can hardly feel it. Erwin’s skin is warm to Levi’s cold fingers, but it doesn’t feel quite warm enough. Was it like that before?

Levi hears a branch snap outside and all the air in the room seems to mold itself into a tunnel in front of him, focused, whispering urgently like it had all those months ago: _Get out they’re_ -

He shakes his head to clear it. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, except that he must not take his hand off of Erwin’s skin. He feels utterly wrung out, exhausted, exposed as if his skin is inside out. Erwin’s soft, shallow breaths dig at him like a pickaxe.

“Please,” he whispers to the air, so softly Erwin wouldn’t even be able to hear it if he were conscious, “Please, Erwin.”

Something else sounds outside, sharp and unnatural, and Levi doesn’t even flinch.

A long time passes, or none does. It’s impossible to tell. The night gets thicker, colder, the crickets and bullfrogs and owls getting louder, but Levi feels as if he is suspended between realities - watching time pass without touching it.

Suddenly something crashes through the trees with a thundering, distinctly mechanical sound. Levi jumps without meaning to, squeezing Erwin’s leg.

A loud, ringing voice calls into the house from outside. There is the unmistakable sound of an _engine_ running.

“Levi!”

Levi’s heart leaps and he stands, hand still unerringly wrapped around Erwin’s comfortingly warm ankle.  

“Here.” He doesn’t move. He can’t move. He can’t leave him.

The door bursts open and there is more than one pair of footsteps in the house. Three, if Levi focuses and counts.

A head pokes into the bedroom and wide, intense green eyes fall on Levi, then on Erwin. The boy can’t be older than 24 or 25.

“Hanji, in here!”

Levi recognizes his voice then. Hope. It’s Hope.

Levi goes to speak but somehow the sight of another living, breathing, /healthy/ person has locked up his whole chest. He feels tangled up in his panic, unable to navigate so much feeling at once.

Another head pokes in, this one with considerably longer, far filthier hair, face curious and of a completely indeterminate gender. He knows instinctively this is Hysteria. Hope had called them -

“Hanji?” Levi makes himself say. His  voice croaks. He’d hardly noticed before. He hasn’t spoken to a person who wasn’t Erwin in _years_.

Hanji nods, eyes already on Erwin. They pace the bed, stepping around Levi without asking him to move. They take his pulse with their fingers, touch the the sides of his face, peer carefully at the awful, cauterized void of his arm.

“We need to move him. Now.”

Levi’s hand tightens. He meets Hanji’s eyes but doesn’t know what to say.

“I’ll help,” Hope says, voice suddenly much softer. There is a gun strapped to his back, another at his hip. A knife on his thigh and one more in his boot. Despite his young, open face, Levi feels a prickle of apprehension looking at him. Something instinctive. _Dangerous_ , his mind says.

So when Hope reaches for Erwin, Levi nearly snarls at him like a rabid dog. Hope hesitates at the look on Levi’s face.

“We have to get him out of here, Levi.”

Levi looks at Erwin’s face for a long time, trying to breathe, but his chest feels so heavy it’s almost impossible. Finally he nods, and Hope sighs in relief.

“I’m Eren, by the way,” Hope says. His voice is quiet, as if Erwin is sleeping and he doesn’t want to wake him.

Hanji has no such qualms. They look out at the front door and yell, “Coast clear, Meeks?”

Levi hears the sound of two distinct guns cocking and then the low, even tone of Death’s voice: “Clear.”

Hanji turns back to them. “Try and jostle him as little as possible, but we need to move.”

The three of them pick Erwin up: Hope - Eren - at Erwin’s feet, Hanji holding his middle, and Levi with his hand under one arm, cradling his head like a precious thing.

Death looks oddly familiar; she has a hard, flat expression that Levi recognizes from his own face, and her hands are deft on her guns. The way she stands immediately sets Levi’s teeth on edge, instincts screaming for a fight. He nods at her and she nods back, covering them as they carry Erwin to the vehicle.

It’s not a car as much as it is some strange cross between an ATV and a truck. It looks like it’s been assembled from a mess of different parts, and the whole thing smells - strange. Like it runs on something besides gasoline.

Eren gets behind the wheel and Death keeps her weapons out as she gets into the passenger side with him. Her eyes never leave the woods.

Levi and Hanji put Erwin in the bed of the truck and Hanji turns and yells to the front: “All clear, babies.”

They take off, and the first bump causes Erwin’s head to bounce horribly off the wooden bench. Levi grabs it too late and Hanji winces and says, “Eren, maybe a little softer, alright?”

Hanji messes around with a few bottles and instruments that Levi is utterly unfamiliar with, giving Erwin several injections and then bandaging the awful stump of his arm. They talk softly, as if talking to Erwin. Levi can’t make most of it out until the last bit:

“You’ve lost too much blood, my friend.”

Hanji takes his pulse and blood pressure, shaking their head. The casual assessment makes Levi’s heart freeze in his chest. “We need to do something right now.”

Then they turn to Levi.

“You don’t happen to know his blood type, do you?”

Levi closes his eyes for a moment. “No. But I’m a universal donor. You can take mine.”

Hanji shakes their filthy head. Levi notes with relief that their hands are very clean. “He’s lost too much to take it from one person. It’s not safe for you.”

Levi shrugs. Hanji furrows their brows.

“You’d lose like 40% of your own blood.”

He shrugs again, glancing at Erwin and feeling his chest turn inside out. Something passes over Hanji’s face, and very quietly, they whisper, “I see.”

Levi meets their eyes.

Hanji says, “You’re prepared to do that? Do you understand the risk here? You’re much smaller than h-”

“Will it kill him if he doesn’t get it?”

“It might. He’s in risk of hypervolemic shock. But it also might k-”

“Just do it.”

Hanji looks at him for a long time. “Listen to me, Levi.” Levi glances at them, but it’s impossible to look away from Erwin. His hand drifts over Erwin’s forehead and he pushes his hair back gently. Hanji’s voice is soft, but sure.

“With the difference in your sizes, the amount that I would have to take from you to stabilize Erwin is _extremely_ dangerous for you.”

Levi nods. His ears have stopped ringing. He can help him. He can save him.

“This isn’t a hospital. Things go wrong, do you understand? This could _kill_ you.”

He thinks back to the conversation they had at the Base, a lifetime ago. _Something about loving something capable of destroying you._

Levi nods again.

“Do it.”

“Levi -”

“Fucking _do_ it.” Then, quieter so the two in the front can’t hear: “Please.”

Hanji sets their jaw and nods.

“Lay down and take off that shirt - how much of this blood on you is yours?”

Levi glances down. “None of it.”

“You’re sure? Positive?”

Levi thinks, then nods.

“If infected blood got into a cut in your skin, even a small one, even your eyes-”

“It didn’t.” He doesn’t remember as well as he should. The whole thing is a red haze of fear and violence. But he is sure of this thing. They hadn’t touched him.

Hanji doesn’t look convinced.

“Hanji,” Levi says, voice soft, hand still gentle in Erwin’s hair, “If I thought my blood was infected I would _never_ give it to him. Ever.”

“Still, I’d like to test it,” Hanji says even as they turn away for alcohol and needles. “Even with your blood type there’s still the chance of rejection. Doing this without tests is incredibly risky.” They don’t look upset. They look... _curious._ Almost excited. It is disconcertingly at odds with their words. “Unfortunately, we don’t have time for that.”

They lean forward while Levi reaches to take off his shirt, holding several awful-smelling sponges. “I’ll have to take your word that you aren’t infected until I can test you myself. If you’re wrong,” they shoot Levi a dark look. “We’ll have to kill you.”

Levi nods, gets his shirt off and Hanji stops, staring at him. Levi bristles.

“What?”

“Hm?” Hanji blinks a few times, then busies themselves with the needles again. “Just noting that you are covered in a _lot_ of blood. And scars.”

“They’re old.”

“I can see that.”

“And obviously not from those...things.”

“Titans.”

“So they aren’t fucking relevant.”

Hanji raises their eyebrows. “Alright, alright.” They gesture next to Erwin and put on a pair of nitrile gloves. “Get comfortable...ish. And lean back. Make a fist.”

Levi does as he’s told, quiet as Hanji cleans his whole arm - and his torso too. He nods in approval without thinking about it and Hanji quirks their lips.

Erwin’s eyelids don’t even flicker when Hanji puts the needle in, and something about that makes Levi feel sick to his stomach.

“Have you eaten today?”

Levi looks at them, expression incredulous.

“Right,” Hanji says. “Are you sure about this?”

Levi looks at Erwin and is overwhelmed by the singular desire to press their lips together. What if something happens? What if Erwin needs more blood than Levi can give?

That answer is simple: Levi will give it, and then he will die.

But Erwin won’t.

“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t sure.”

Hanji nods and presses the other needle to Levi’s skin. There’s a setup above Levi’s head where his blood is drained into some sort of bag and then back into Erwin. He watches it go, willing it to work.

Levi settles back with his head against the side of the truck and closes his eyes. He doesn’t know how much time passes. The ride is bumpy, though not as bad as that first one. He suddenly feels exhausted, the day crashing down around him. He cracks open one eye to see Hanji looking curiously at Erwin, eyes narrowed.

“What?”

Hanji looks up, then waves a hand. “I was just wondering why his blood loss is so severe. Usually this sort of thing is only required with ongoing blood loss, like internal bleeding.”

Levi swallows heavily. He hadn’t even considered that. Hanji continues.

“It’s strange that a direct person to person transfusion is required, but it absolutely is.” They scratch their head absently, curse when they realize their hands are dirty, then put on another clean pair of gloves. “Either Erwin has internal bleeding, or his arm was left to bleed for quite some time before he was able to cauterize it.”

Levi winces at the mention of the cauterization. He can’t think about it. Erwin’s other hand has a long bright burn mark on the palm, which Hanji inspects as they talk.

“I imagine,” Hanji says, absently cleaning and dressing the burn, “that the Titans cut off his arm and then Erwin was either knocked out or passed out. He bled for some amount of time before he woke up and stopped the bleeding himself.”

Levi looks at Erwin’s face again.

“Christ, Erwin.”

Hanji nods, focused on checking Erwin over for other injuries, signs of internal bleeding.

“Honestly it’s remarkable that he’s survived this long. Stubborn, is he?”

Levi feels his lips twitch. He nods.

“How do you feel so far, Levi?”

He feels...dizzy. Light, like he’s very hungry.

“Alright,” he says, eyelids flickering a little. Hanji tuts at him.

“Drink this,” they say sternly, shoving something in a plastic bag into his hands. “I doubt it will help much, but it’ll do something.”

Levi drinks. It’s disgustingly sweet.

“I have no IV fluids,” Hanji says, sounding frustrated, “Otherwise I doubt this would have been necessary. So if you pass out...well, I hope we’re close to home. Otherwise -”

Levi waves his free hand, cutting them off. “I get it.”

He’s .... _so_ dizzy now. His brain is slow and fuzzy. How had this happened so quickly? How much time was passing? How much of his blood was already out of him and in Erwin instead?

He smiles. Erwin needs it more.

“You love him,” Hanji says, so softly no one else can hear.

Levi has never heard it aloud before. He sighs.

“How long have you been together?”

Levi shrugs. He’s incredibly lightheaded. He thumps his head against the wall behind him and closes his eyes. “I found him. In the woods.”

Hanji seems to take this as an appropriate answer.

Levi feels something odd in his chest, like a sob or a hiccup. It takes a moment to realize it is a _giggle_.

How much of his blood is gone?

“Makes sense,” he mumbles, turning his head to Erwin. “Makes sense that you’d be like this.” He reaches his free hand over to touch Erwin’s face. “Fuckin’ draining the life out of me. Thank fuck.”

Hanji is quiet, watching the two of them curiously.

“God of plague,” Levi says, voice slurred now. “God of healing. God of medicine.”

“Apollo,” Hanji says softly, eyes turning to Erwin. The corner of their lips turn up a little.

“My Apollo,” Levi slurs, light dancing in little patterns in front of his closed eyes. He opens them but he can’t see very well. Everything is spotted with a ringing, deep blue.

“Levi?”

Levi feels his head roll from one side to the other, but it’s very hard to control it. It’s so _heavy_.

Hanji gets in his face and grips his jaw. Their hands are shockingly strong.

“Levi!”

Levi opens his eyes. Hanji is a strange, vague blue outline.

“We’re not close enough yet,” Hanji says, though Levi’s ears are ringing so loud he can hardly hear. It feels like someone has stuffed cotton into them. “You can’t do this yet. Wake up.”

Levi furrows his eyebrows and waves his hand as if to bat away an insect. _Go away, I want to sleep._

“Levi.”

_Leave me alone._

“Open your eyes, Levi.”

_I’m so tired -_

“Erwin _needs_ you, Levi, please -”

Levi’s eyes wrench open.

“Erwin?” He croaks the name before his exhausted brain can make sense of it.

It’s just Hanji. Erwin is still terribly quiet next to him. He reaches for him, but his hands are _freezing_. They barely work.

His brain is so fuzzy, the thoughts slow and disconnected. Erwin. He wants Erwin. He wants to be closer to him.

He moves, and Hanji lurches forward to stop him.

“Please,” he says softly. “Just for a minute. I’m so tired.”

Hanji’s eyes are sharp on his face, concerned. He wonders how he must look.

He slumps down next to Erwin on the bench, careful not to interrupt the needles in their arms, and looks at his face. His mind feels filled with a soft, thick fog. Everything seems...smaller. Closer. Flat, almost. Like he’s looking at the world, hearing it, seeing it, on a piece of paper.

He touches Erwin’s face and his skin is _so_ warm compared to Levi’s fingers. Warmer than before, surely. Levi feels himself smile. It’s the most he’s smiled in longer than he can remember, and it’s from delirium. Figures.

He kisses the side of Erwin’s head, heedless of Hanji watching the two of them, and whispers to him, “Don’t die.”

Then he whispers to Hanji, barely raising his voice - it suddenly seems a great effort to speak normally - with his mouth still pressed against Erwin’s hair, “Thank you for saving him.”

Hanji shakes their head. “He’s not out of the woods yet.”

Levi laughs. “Out of the woods.” Then he has one brief, blinding moment of fear and he looks at Hanji and says, “We need to get out of the woods.”

“We are, Levi.”

“Something is _wrong_ -”

“I know.”

Levi’s thoughts are impossible to corral into a coherent line. It’s all so much _effort_. He’s never been so tired in his life. He kisses Erwin’s temple and says softly, “Promise me something, Hanji.”

“Hm?”

“If I pass out and Erwin still needs blood, _promise_ me you’ll keep giving it to him.”

Hanji looks disturbed. “I can’t promise that. It would likely kill you.”

“ _Please_ ,” Levi says, numb fingers of his free hand curling over Erwin’s good shoulder. Somehow, he still smells like himself. Under all the blood and chemicals and death. Still smells just as gold, like sun-warmed skin. Levi’s voice is slurred when he speaks. “If he - I can’t - I don’t want to - Just. Please, promise me that.”

Hanji touches Levi’s face, inspecting it, a strange mix of concern, affection, and medical curiosity.

“Fine.”

Levi sighs in relief and then collapses.

Dimly, he can still hear, as if through a soft fabric filter.

“Eren,” Hanji says, voice sharp and panicked for the first time, “How close are we?”

Eren’s voice is too hard to hear, and Levi’s ears are ringing, and Hanji is checking on Erwin again, and everything is too heavy to hold up - his head, his arms, his eyes, the _sounds_ and smells, his own heart.

Hanji’s voice is very distant when they say, “I’m sorry, Levi.”

Then Levi falls backwards into nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a short sort of interlude chapter and the next one will come SOON, i promise, i'm already almost done with it<3  
> love yall lemme know thoughts


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.  
>  \- Jeanette Winterson // Written on the Body_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the delay guys, i've got A LOT going on right now, and i lost my computer. it's back now.  
> like an insane person, i wrote almost all of this in like 2 hours. it might be a mess, but it was weirdly personal for me.

_I’m sorry, Levi._

Levi notes three things when he wakes: one, that he has the worst headache of his life, two, that he has never been so thirsty, and three, that he is _fucking_ alive. Hanji’s voice echoes strangely in his head, like half a dream he can’t quite remember having.

_I’m sorry, Levi. I can’t let you die._

_I’m breaking my promise._

He sits up slowly, gingerly, holding his head like it’s going to shatter if he moves it too fast, and finds an unfamiliar person asleep in his room.

He can’t make his brain work. Everything is slow and hard to push, like there are grains of sand in the gears. His body feels strange. What had he been -

It slams into him all at once.

“Erwin.”

The unfamiliar person starts awake, blue eyes so huge it makes them look like a china doll.

Levi suddenly can’t breathe.

“Is - is Erwin - what -“

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” the person says quickly, scrambling. Levi realizes with a shock that he recognizes the voice.

“Control?”

Control smiles, and Levi cannot believe they put their faith in this _child_ , no matter how well-founded it turned out to be. He looks younger than Eren. He looks like a teenager.

“It’s Armin, actually,” he says, voice soft. Then he adds, “Erwin is alive.”

Levi’s breath all leaves him at once and he collapses back into the bed.

Bed-?

He looks down.

He’s in a bed. A real one, soft and mercifully clean. Not to mention that _he’s_ also clean -

His brain still fuzzy and struggling to contain his thoughts in a straight line he says, “Control, did someone _bathe_ me while I was unconscious?”

Control winces, then says,

“Armin.”

“ _Well_?”

Control - Armin - nods. “Sorry. It was just - you guys were really gross. Hanji said it was dangerous to the medical integrity of the hospital.”

Levi’s brain is still so confused, so fuzzy. There is far too much for him to process, and he keeps slipping in and out of understanding.

The only thing that he knows is -

“Erwin is alive.”

Armin nods. “Yes.”

“Better?”

Armin tilts his head to the right and then back again. “You saved his life. And he’s on really heavy duty antibiotics.”

Then he smiles, so wide it almost makes Levi smile too. “But yeah. A lot better.”

The little grains of sand in Levi’s brain trickle through one at a time until he finally processes that and asks, through a rush of inhumanly strong relief, “Awake?”

“In and out. Like you. We’ve been taking turns.”

Levi moves to get up, though his whole body is sore and his head hurts so badly he feels like he can _see_ his headache. He’s _freezing_.

Armin puts out both hands with a concerned expression and says, “Woah, what do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m going to see him.”

“No way.”

Levi gives Armin a look. Despite the fact that he feels like he’s made of wet paper, he must have retained some amount of himself in his expression because Armin pales.

“Are you going to stop me?”

Armin sighs, then scoots his chair closer to Levi’s bed. “Levi, you almost died. You would have had permanent brain damage if I hadn’t been able to give you blood.”

Levi stops. Armin offers a small smile.

“O negative. Universal donor, just like you.”

“You...”

“Nothing like what you did,” Armin says in a rush. “That was incredibly stupid, actually. But I gave you enough so you wouldn’t have permanent damage, you know?” He runs a hand through his hair, almost nervous. “Just to help you, like, heal faster.”

Levi is stunned. No one has ever done such a thing for him before. And he doesn’t even know the kid.

“I - thank you.”

Armin shrugs. “It really wasn’t a big deal. We don’t have to facilities to keep blood around otherwise it wouldn’t have even been necessary.”

“Kid -”

“Armin.”

“Armin. I appreciate it. A lot. But I need to see Erwin.” He can feel the dark look on his own face and he only half regrets it. “You don’t want to get in my way.”

Armin sighs, running a hand over his face. At that moment Eren pokes his head into the room and says, “Hey, Arm, it’s my turn to - oh holy _shit_!”

Levi raises his eyebrows at Eren and Eren takes off down the hall, yelling.

“Hanji! He’s awake! Hanj-”

Levi decides more people will make this much harder and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. He glares at Armin and says in a low voice, “Move, or take me to him.”

Armin gets up and helps Levi to his feet. There’s an enormous headrush that nearly puts him down, and Armin’s hand tightens on his shoulder. He hates it. It makes a tinny, frantic voice in his head whisper the same thing over and over again.

_Don’t touch me -_

He shrugs Armin off with a quiet “I got it.”

They’re halfway down the hall when they run into Hanji. Levi is dimly aware that he should be taking stock of his surroundings, but the only thing in his mind is _Erwin Erwin Erwin Erwin -_

Hanji looks at Levi, tuts, and then points to a door near the end of the hall.

“He’s in there but I still need to run tests on you, goddamn it.”

Levi waves them off and catches a small smile on their lips as he passes.

Armin is still hovering at his back like he’s waiting for Levi to pitch forward at any moment.

He suddenly needs them all to leave. He can’t see Erwin in front of anyone; he’s terrified of what the sight of Erwin will do to him. The thought of looking at Erwin’s face, _touching_ him - it devastates him. He will not be able to keep his face from showing it, and being so openly laid bare in front of these strangers turns his stomach.

“Gimme... some space.”

Armin frowns, and Levi says with exasperation, “Kid, I’m not going to keel over.”

Blessedly, they all leave him alone.

He hesitates by the door. His mind is a bright, buzzing blank, his fingers and toes numb with a sudden surge of inexplicable panic. What - what will -

He shakes his head and opens the door.

Erwin is _awake_. He turns and looks at him, smiles so big it hurts to look at, and says, all casual, “Hello, Levi.”

All at once, the world is ending.

Levi’s knees give out and he falls against the door, gripping the handle behind him to stay standing. He can’t - even _think_ with Erwin this close to him -

“Levi?”

His name has never belonged to him like it does now. It decimates him. He feels completely uncovered, shattered and put carefully, painstakingly back together. He is gasping without realizing it. He can’t make his feet work. He can’t move.

Erwin speaks again, gestures with his arm. It still looks so strange to only see one there.

“Hey. Come here.”

Levi’s feet move on their own without a second thought, where they’d been completely immobile seconds before. He goes.

He sits in the chair next to Erwin’s bed - far too close, not nearly close enough. He can’t bring himself to touch him. He knows that when he does, it will destroy them both.

So he sits and puts his hands in his lap - bricks up the space between them with slow, painful deliberation, repeating the same phrase in his head over and over.

_Never again. Never again. Never again._

He will not allow himself to be gutted like this again. If he must put a distance between them to do that - his heart makes a terrible hollow lurch at the thought - then so be it.

Never again.

It was too much power to put in Erwin’s hands, too much trust. A mistake.

He tries desperately to believe it but can’t stop the way he stares at the dip in Erwin’s throat, like a man dying of thirst.

Erwin speaks, a gravity in his words that Levi is unprepared for, and it bulldozes straight through the careful wall Levi is rebuilding.

“Hanji told me nearly half of the blood in my body is yours.”

Levi feels like the chair where he sits has dropped a few inches, sending his stomach up into his chest, battering his heart. His hands clench. The arches of his feet tingle horribly. His breath stops in his throat.

He can’t speak. He meets Erwin’s eyes for a half second and the look there - it undoes him altogether.

He can see the frantic beating of Erwin’s heart, if he looks closely. Pounding just under his jaw. Pounding with _Levi’s blood._

“I - yes.”

Erwin stares for another long moment. There seems to be something stopping him from reaching forward - perhaps it is just Levi’s expression. They simply look at each other. Levi’s hands shake.

Erwin holds his hand up in front of his face, studies it. Looks at the veins there, all the tiny capillaries holding him together.

“Yours,” he says softly, too softly. Levi isn’t sure he’s meant to hear it.

He does.

There is something about seeing Erwin, watching him move and speak, watching the beat of his own blood in Erwin’s veins, that freezes Levi to his core.

He feels terrified in a way he never has before.

Erwin was _dead_. Levi had accepted that, and then he had accepted that Erwin was alive but _he_ was dead, and then he’d woken up and _neither_ of them were dead and -

And he didn’t -

He couldn’t -

He sits quietly, hands shaking in his lap, and can’t even look Erwin in the eyes.

He remembers how the first time he touched Erwin, he’d been so terrified after he hadn’t been able to look at him. He remembers how the second time he touched Erwin - really, _really_ touched him, Erwin had disappeared the next morning and taken all of Levi’s humanity with him.

“Levi?”

How many times must he do this? How many times must he force himself to look, to touch, and then inevitably lose everything, before it completely destroys him? Erwin cannot possibly understand this, this fear.

“Levi.”

He lifts his eyes back to Erwin’s face - but not his eyes - with a colossal, terrifying effort.

Erwin’s expression stuns him. He’s never seen it like this. The lights are too bright for such an expression - it exists for starlight and fires and whispered confessions, not this. Too stark. Too open. Levi feels them both being flayed alive.

“You think I’m not afraid?” Erwin whispers, almost angry. Of course he sees straight to the heart of him. Of course.

“You think I don’t see that look on your face and feel it twisting my fucking chest?”

The curse stops Levi’s spiraling mind in its tracks, like it always does.

“I know what I’ve done,” Erwin says, soft. Levi shakes his head. He has no idea.

“No-“

“I failed you,” Erwin cuts in, hard. “I failed to protect myself.”

Levi blinks. “That’s -”

He swallows harshly and doesn’t finish his sentence.

“You-” Erwin cuts off, and his voice cracks like he’s breaking. “You don’t ever want to feel this again. I did that.”

They sit for far too long, Levi’s stomach twisted into one awful, confused snarl of roots.

“I’m sorry, Levi.”

His voice is - Levi has never heard it like this before. He sounds completely destroyed. Heartbroken. So unsure, so quiet. So utterly unlike himself.

Levi shakes his head, but what he means is -

What he means -

What does he mean?

He can’t string his thoughts together. He is utterly consumed by the vulnerability in Erwin’s expression, the unshaken devotion in his face.

But he - he can’t -

_Nearly half of the blood in my body is yours._

“Erwin,” he says, too soft, like a hesitant prayer. He looks back at his hands.

They are half the same thing, now. It dawns on Levi slowly, insidious and life-changing, like a trickle of water leaking out of a dam.

They are inexorably tangled together. They are ruined by each other.

“Please stop,” Erwin asks, tone still skirting pain. “Just please stop looking like that.”

Levi hates the look on Erwin’s face: desperate. He keeps talking, killing Levi a little with every word. The crack in the dam keeps trickling. “Please, Levi you must know how much I -”

“Don’t,” Levi interrupts sharply, too sharply. Like he’s holding a knife.

“Don’t say it.” He feels himself choke on the next word: “Please.”

He cannot escape him. Building walls is futile. He would sooner cut off half of his own body.

The trickle in the dam builds to a flood, emotion rising terrifying and sticky and hot in his chest before Erwin even speaks.

“But I do. You know I do.”

Levi feels his very bones shaking.

This is what love is?

This is agony.

He fears the blood in his chest will cave it in and drown him. The mere sight of Erwin’s face feels like a desolation.

Yet he would sooner cut his own eyes out than ever look away again, and how _strange_ a thing this is -

This?

This? Levi’s thoughts freeze, skip on it.

Love is annihilation; he feels his insides tearing themselves apart. He knows the truth now - he cannot ever hope to build a wall against this. He doesn’t want to. The dam floods.

He’s moved so much closer, when had he done that? Erwin is so close now. He smells like chemicals and medicine but still, in the roots of his hair and the quiet huffs of his breath, he smells like himself.

God, what it does to him. Erwin’s smell.

Human beings are stronger than Levi has ever given them credit for, to live with this feeling. To welcome it. _Love_.

“Levi?”

Hesitant. Erwin sounds hesitant. Levi looks him in the eye, finally.

He watches Erwin read his face and draw in a sharp breath, like he’s been shot.

“Oh,” he says, soft like a sigh.

Then the corners of his lips curl up and the dam breaks.

He doesn’t realize he’s moving until he’s already kissing him.

He can’t breathe, he can’t think, he has no idea how he got so close, his heart is thundering in his ears and he can feel Erwin’s under his own fingers where they rest on the sides of his neck and it’s his blood in Erwin’s veins and -

“Jesus Christ,” Levi says softly, right up against Erwin’s mouth. “This is going to kill me.”

Erwin keeps smiling against his mouth and it hurts, it makes his chest ache, he never wants it to stop -

“I can’t believe you were so reckless,” Erwin murmurs, fingers running down Levi’s arm to the place where Hanji took his blood.

“Can’t believe you were so _stupid_ ,” Levi breathes back.

_I almost lost you, I almost lost you._

His hands go to Erwin’s face on their own. He can’t stop touching him, all the sudden. He shifts so he’s further on the bed, sitting next to Erwin, facing him. He presses their foreheads together and they both sigh as if experiencing some colossal relief.

Levi’s still shaking when he kisses him again, too feverish for the bright lights and still air of the room.  Erwin’s mouth tastes the same; it kills him.

He has no idea how long they kiss, but something catches in his throat every single time Erwin puts his lips to it. He can feel his heart pounding under Erwin’s mouth where he drags it down the side of his neck, no teeth, just soft lips and overwarm tongue. It’s so gentle it burns him.

His hands squeeze into fists over Erwin’s heart, almost like a salute. He shakes.

Erwin winds his arm around Levi’s back and then freezes, pulls back and blinks. His face is confused, then devastated. He looks down.

Levi touches his face, so tenderly he shocks himself. He isn’t capable of this.

“I forgot,” Erwin whispers, barely audible. “I can still... _feel_ it. I forgot it wasn’t there.”

What is he-

Oh.

Carefully, avoiding the bandage and the awful void of air where his arm should be, Levi kisses Erwin’s shoulder.

Erwin whimpers, an awful noise. Small, pained, heartbroken. Levi kisses his shoulder again, then the side of his neck, then his throat, then his ear. He doesn’t speak; he doesn’t know what to say.

He must be on painkillers, otherwise he would be in agony. Wouldn’t he?

Is he anyway? Levi is.

Levi’s stomach drops in shame when he realizes he never asked Erwin -

“How do you feel?”

Erwin shrugs. “Dizzy,” he says. “Fuzzy. Exhausted. I think they drugged me some.”

Levi nods, hands still all over him: tracing his pulse down the side of his neck, drawing little lines up the top of his spine into his hairline. Feather-light on his cheekbones, his lips. He can’t stop. It’s like a compulsion.

“I can still feel it, Levi,” Erwin says. His voice breaks. “It feels so strange to not feel it touching you.”

Levi, at a loss, kisses behind his ear and murmurs, “Yeah.”

He still can’t stop touching him. His hands smooth down his arm to his hand, where the burn on his palm is trying to heal. Erwin doesn’t even wince when Levi runs his fingers over it.

He is so overwhelmed. When he looks at him he thinks, lucid and afraid, _I love him_.

It feels like throwing himself off a cliff. He kisses him again, terrified by the desperation clawing at the inside of his chest. Erwin groans softly and it heats through Levi’s whole body. He’s so cold and Erwin is so warm.

His hands drift lower, to his chest, where he can feel the rumble of Erwin’s quiet little noises, then to his stomach, then to the waistband of his pants.

He pauses.

“What?” Erwin rumbles, arm forgotten for this one single moment.

“I don’t wanna ... take advantage,” Levi admits, nodding to the steady drip of painkillers in Erwin’s IV.

Erwin wraps his arm around Levi’s back again and pulls him so close that Levi feels it rock his whole body when he speaks.

“Please,” he says, low and right into Levi’s ear, “Take advantage.”

Goosebumps roll down the back of Levi’s neck, spread cool and shivering across his shoulders. He straddles Erwin on the bed without a second thought.

When he sinks his hands into Erwin’s hair and kisses him this time, a shiver runs through him all the way to his toes. He scratches fingers over the scalp and the sound Erwin makes actually has Levi _gasping_ against the side of his neck, rolling their hips together and trying to get impossibly closer.

Everything feels the same and yet completely different, as if the two of them are naked in front of each other for the first time.

Levi’s never been naked like this. He can’t stop _touching_. He feels like he’s burning alive.

He brings both hands to Erwin’s waistband and Erwin breathes out a soft, “oh, _please_ ,” and Levi feels dizzy from how hard is, all the sudden.

He wraps both hands around Erwin’s cock at once - he’s only half hard and already so thick that Levi huffs a laugh against his neck - and Erwin’s head drops backwards and hits the wall with a loud thump.

Levi’s hands go immediately to the back of Erwin’s head and he says, too gentle, who _is_ he, “Careful, careful.”

Erwin shakes his head and smiles a little, leaning forward to bite gently at Levi’s bottom lip. He whispers, “Stop worrying and put your hands back or so help me, Levi -”

Levi puts his hands back, grinning, and Erwin’s voice cuts off in a soft, perfect moan that makes Levi’s toes curl.

It’s rushed, and messy, and uncomfortable, and the only thing Levi can ever imagine wanting in his entire life. Erwin makes soft little noises under him when he twists his wrist just the right way, cock leaking all over Levi’s hands. Levi feels himself breaking apart from the way Erwin’s hand is spread against the small of his back, warm and possessive, like he wants to keep Levi there forever.

Erwin kisses him like he’s starving one minute, like he wants to destroy him, like he understands exactly the annihilation that tears at Levi’s chest, and the next minute kisses him so gently it hurts. Like he can hardly manage it for how much he loves him. Like he can hardly touch Levi’s lips without burning.

Everything is different now.

Levi pulls back and looks down at his hands around Erwin’s cock, watches it twitch when he runs a thumb over the slit and grins, actually _grins,_ and he feels insane, delirious, broken open, and then a knock sounds at the door.

“I’m coming in in precisely four seconds,” says Hanji’s voice, and Levi scrambles backwards with ice shocking through his chest, “Just so you both know.”

He pants, red-faced, at the foot of the bed, still unmistakably hard in his thin sleep pants, and looks at Erwin.

Erwin barely gets his dick back in his pants before Hanji opens the door.

Hanji barges in, looks between the two of them and grins. They have a clipboard in their hands, like a real doctor. Levi raises his eyebrows at it.

“Fancy, hm?” Hanji asks, winking. Then their face sobers into something like professionalism.

“So I need to run a few blood tests on the both of you - mostly to make sure you’re not sporting any Titan blood, but also to make sure the transfusions are going well. Sound good?”

Levi nods, ears still ringing. He looks at Erwin and gives a tiny shrug, then lets his eyes flicker just once to Erwin’s half-hard cock.

Erwin actually _blushes_ , and Levi’s heart seizes in his chest.

“Blood loss has a slow recovery time,” Hanji says, looking down at their chart and pacing the little room, “So you’ll have some time to get used to our little operation here while you heal.”

“Aren’t you worried about those - ” Levi waves his hand and makes a disgusted face - “ _things_ getting in? I mean, Contr- uh,  _Armin_ practically broadcast your location over the comm to us. They definitely heard it.”

Hanji waves a hand dismissively. “We had a scout there, at the walls Armin talked about, looking for you. She was going to pick you up and take you here. But that’s not where we are now. We’re very well hidden.”

_Clever_ , Levi thinks.

Levi shares a look with Erwin, who looks surprised. Also dazed. Also still flushed, and _god_ , fucking _gorgeous_ -

“The Titans have been trying to find this base for months,” Hanji says, expression a strange mix of pride and anxiety, “They don’t know where we are.”

Erwin’s voice rumbles through Levi’s chest when he speaks and Levi almost forgets Hanji’s in the room: “So we’re - safe.”

Hanji grins. “Yes.”

Levi and Erwin share another look, and Levi wants desperately to touch his chest, to feel the reverberation of those words through it.

_We’re safe._

“By the way,” Hanji says, pointing at Levi, “I can’t believe you’re even sitting up. You’re doing remarkably -”

“Hanji!”

All three of them turn toward the voice, frantic and jarringly loud. Eren.

He slams into the doorway with his shoulder, as if he’d been running too fast and couldn’t stop, and pants, “The - truck - that got Erwin -”

The look on Hanji’s face makes Levi reach for Erwin, instinctively wrapping a hand around Erwin’s ankle.

“The one we just took out?"

Eren nods.

"What about it?”

“We were checking it over - after it pulled in and - ”

“Eren, _what?_ ”

Eren’s face is terrifying, dark, much darker than Levi has seen it before.

“We found a tracker on it. Under the tire. Must have been put there while we were inside.”

Levi remembers those sounds, while he'd been waiting for Hanji. Like an animal, rooting around the cabin. Branches breaking. He hadn't paid them any attention. Erwin had been  _dying_. Those monsters had been waiting there, just outside, waiting to _follow them back_. They'd been right there and Levi hadn't even - he hadn't even  _noticed_ -  

A faint flush rises to Hanji’s face.  That same strange misplaced excitement as before, the same one he heard over the radio. Levi feels his chest constricting, grip tightening around Erwin’s ankle. Erwin reaches his hand down and grips Levi’s shoulder in silence. No one else speaks except Eren.

“They found us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uh oh


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand;blood and revenge are hammering in my head.”  
> -William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: blood, gore, general violent mayhem

When it happens, it rains.

It's been two weeks. Two weeks of pins-and-needles waiting, two weeks of frantic weapons gathering and uneasy truces and hurried, anxious healing.

Levi's still cold. No one had mentioned that bit about blood loss before.

But he can hold a sword.

They give him a gun but he refuses it, so instead they take his sword and put two new ones in his hands, long and sharp and exactly the same, balanced and weightless in his palms. He feels the expression on his face, feels that it’s too sharp and too violent, but he doesn’t stop it. These  _things_ have taken too much from him. 

The steel of the swords catches the light, glints over Levi's face, and he knows the Titans deserve every drop of blood he's going to shed over this.

Erwin's not healed. But he's Erwin, so he's out of bed anyway. When the call comes in that it's starting, he grabs his sniper rifle and heads for the tower. Their sniper's already there and they've trained together.  Erwin likes her. He trusts her. Levi isn’t sure if that’s wise or not.

He stops him with a hand on his arm just before he turns to go.

"Erwin -"

The camp is chaos. There are alarms blaring, people are screaming. Someone is yelling for Levi.

He stares at Erwin in the hallway, heartbeat slowing in that way it always does before a fight. Like the world is stopping.

They look at each other for a long time.

"Don't die," Levi says, but his voice shakes. It feels heavier than that. His swords are crisscrossed against his back and he can feel the straps pressed to his chest, but an enormous weight eases off it when he looks at Erwin.

“Don’t die,” Erwin echoes.

People are running past them in the hallway. Someone bumps into Levi's shoulder.

"Are you ready?" Erwin asks, voice low and soft. Like it's just them. Like they have all the time in the world.

Levi looks for a long time, memorizes his face: the sharp, stubbled line of his jaw, the red shell of his ear, the gold-spun hair growing longer and longer over the back of his neck, the determined, almost _cruel_ set of his mouth.

He meets his eyes - he'll never forget those, never, and he wants to have them right there, right at the front of his mind if he dies today - and nods. Just once.

Erwin reaches up and pushes the hair off Levi's forehead, leans forward and -

\- and Levi's heart stops beating in his chest, slows and then skips and then stops all together -

\- and Erwin presses his lips to Levi's forehead, just for a second, just for one second, but that's all he needs to -

\- and Levi knows he can't die, he can't, because if Erwin lives he can't _leave_ him -

Erwin's big warm hand is still against the side of Levi's neck. He draws in one long, shuddering breath, then takes a step back.

He reaches over his shoulders and draws both his swords at once. The sound is a hollow, ringing, _silver_ sort of sound, and it reminds Levi of that sharpening stone, of when it was just them camping together, of the careful, methodical way Erwin worked past all his defenses.

With one perfectly weighted sword in each hand, Levi says, "Okay."

And Erwin understands. He always understands.  Thunder rumbles in the distance, getting closer.

"Okay."

They walk out side by side, Erwin with his rifle over his shoulder and Levi with one sword in each hand.

For a moment, it's quiet. For a moment, the whole world waits, and Levi sets his feet on the ground and smells the green, thready smell of new leaves and the heavy, gray smell of wet steel and the deep collective breath of that sudden rush of the storm coming, coming, and then it's on them.

The sky opens up.

The camp is organized by how likely they each are to survive, how easily they can cut people down. They’re only sending three people outside.

Levi steps to the front, is flanked on either side by the quiet girl he knows as Death and the loud, guileless boy he knows as Hope.

He knows their names, but they may all die here and it seems more fitting this way.

They're young, and Levi expects them to shake. To breathe too quickly, to panic. They don't.

The gate to the camp slides open and Levi looks to his right and Hope's eyes are utterly devoid of reason or humanity. A chill shoots down his spine and he grips his swords harder and he knows how this will be.

The storm is fast. It rains on them in heavy, inescapable gray sheets, hisses across the ground and bounces in deafening rounds of white noise off the leaves of the trees. Levi's already soaked to the bone. His hair is plastered to his face, and he reaches up and pushes it off his forehead and thinks with a warm gold flash of memory, of Erwin kissing him there.

The gates open. Levi's breath goes in, holds, and goes out. Slow. Even.

There are a lot of them. At least twice as many as Levi's camp. Their scalps are chipped and torn, their faces yellow and scabbed.

The rain pounds, and it fills Levi's head with nothing.

Hope goes first, tears into them and screams like an animal in a way that raises the hairs on Levi's arms. He's got a submachine gun strapped to his back but he's not using it - he's cutting them down with a sword in one hand and a long baton in the other, making contact with skulls in solid, crushing arcs that spray blood all over his face before the rain washes it away.

There's thunder. It shakes the ground and Levi can feel it, up through the earth and into the soles of his feet and it feels like sonar, like the earth is talking to him, warning him: through the mud and wet leaves and solid trunks of trees, here, the bright white ping of an enemy. Here, here, here. Something in his chest uncurls and he can feel everything: every shift of his muscles, every drop of water. He can _hear_ it when the monsters move; he can feel the way it disrupts the rain.

He ducks just as one swings something huge and blunt at his head and it barely misses him. He goes to his knees, takes out the tendons in four heels and when they drop he drives his swords through two skulls with far too little resistance.

Some of them are intelligent, if only barely. Some of them duck when he comes for them, some of them fight back. Some have a look of determination in their scabbed-over faces, some of fear.

But most of them are chattel. It feels almost _wrong_ to kill them like this.

Levi gets that spine-tingling _sense_ a second too late, something through the trees that feels familiar, that feels like _get out of the woods_ and turns just in time to see one right over him, so much bigger than him, towering over him with an ax in his hand, and then there's the crack of a gunshot and Levi's safe.

He looks to his left, wondering if Death was the one who fired, but she's spinning in a long bloody arc, lit up by lightning, taking down 6 at once before the thunder even hits. It's not her.

Behind Levi, another one falls. Another deep, echoing shot. Long, like a falling tree trunk. Not the bright firecracker sound of a short range weapon.

Sniper rounds.

It's only him; they're only falling around him. He looks up, squints through the rain at the clock tower in the camp.

Erwin.

_Don’t die._

He moves faster now. Cuts one, two, three so deep into the nape of the neck that their heads roll off. There is a growing pile of bodies around the three of them, steaming from the cold rain, and it turns Levi’s stomach but he can’t stop, not now.

Don’t die.

A shot sounds again and one just over Death’s left shoulder goes down, in her blind spot. They are so close to oblivion; one wrong step, one misplaced shot. They are inches from it at any given moment.

Hope screams.

Levi looks up, suddenly and viscerally terrified by the sound of it. One of them has sunk their teeth into Hope’s arm, deep and inescapable and Levi’s heart drops from his chest to the bottom of his stomach.

He’s dead, he has to be. He will be soon. The sickness takes less than a day.

But Hope doesn’t look dazed in the slightest, doesn’t even stumble, just swings the baton full force into one of the Titans’ skulls. Levi doesn’t know how it can deal so much damage; the skull _explodes_ like a watermelon. Hope wields it like a war-hammer.

Another sniper shot, too high. One of the trees over Levi’s head explodes at the trunk.

There are only a few left now. Hope screams again when he cuts one of them down, feral, high-pitched, and a chill darts up Levi’s spine at the sound of it.  He spins and kicks one that had been behind him in the chest, sending it reeling backwards into Death’s sword.

She looks at him and says something, but he can’t hear it over the gray hissing of the rain.

Levi looks down and watches the blood wash off his hands and arms in an ugly pink tide of rainwater. His hair is in his eyes again. The steam from the pile of bodies gives the field outside the camp gates an eerie, dying sort of quality. It’s just the three of them now.

Levi turns to Hope.

“Eren -”

“He’s fine,” Death says, stepping closer to Levi while Hope does the same. They make a tighter formation, shoulder to shoulder, and Hope hefts the machine gun into his hands. The bite is oozing blood and something white, but the rain keeps washing it away.

Very quietly, almost impossible to hear over the rain, Hope says, “I’m a carrier. It’s fine.”

Something singes like a flame up Levi’s spine where his shoulder is pressed against Hope now, some primal instinct that says _Don’t turn your back._

Dangerous.

A carrier.

“Jesus.”

“More are coming,” Death says, and brings up her single sword until its level with her face. The rain is washing the blood off her in pink sheets, spray from the cold steel of her sword flicking up to catch in little silver drops under her jaw.

She looks familiar in a way Levi’s never been able to place. It feels, almost, like seeing himself in a funhouse mirror.

Hope’s hands shake on the trigger of the gun, but Levi understands now. He looks at Hope’s face and sees the look in those bright, bright eyes, sees that it’s not innocent fear there. His hands are shaking with _excitement_.

He’s almost smiling, too-white teeth sharp against his bleeding mouth, when he says, “Now it’s for real.”

Then they come.

There are four of them.

One is tall, almost freakishly so, with dark hair and dark eyes and an expression that looks almost concerned, but not quite. His limbs are stretched out like he’s gone through a taffy puller but the set of his shoulders - like a boxer- makes Levi take an involuntary step back.

One is short, stocky, solid in a way that reminds Levi of a wrestler. His hair is cropped close to his head and he walks like a rolling boulder. He holds no weapons, but it doesn’t matter.

The third and fourth are a short, broad-shouldered woman with blonde hair carrying a broken sword and a tall woman with freckles all over her face and a terrible, wild expression.

All four of them look - very different from the pile of corpses at Levi’s feet. There are no scabs, no yellowed eyes, no blank faces. They are simply four capable people with red lines of scars under their eyes and murderous intent coming off them in waves.

He thinks of Erwin, very briefly. It’s not what he expects. It’s not his eyes in the firelight of the cabin or his hands on Levi’s thighs or that silver-blonde streak of hair he’s grown just over his ears in recent months. It’s his mouth, saying three words.  

_Are you ready?_

Hope is practically vibrating at his left shoulder. He growls low in his throat, like a dog snapping before it’s let off its leash.

Death is the same as Levi. Silent. Still as the grave.

She looks over at Hope and Levi sees a flash of something in her eyes that makes him think of Erwin in the hallway again. He understands, then, that she will die before she lets them harm Hope.

Levi wants to work out a plan, a strategy; there are four Titans and only three of them and they should -

But Hope is growling again and then he’s screaming and emptying his gun into all four of them, and somehow they don’t go down - the bullets tearing into their torsos don’t even seem to slow them all that much -

_Spinal cords, sever their spinal cords -_

Another deep, ringing sniper shot echoes through the forest and the freckled girl takes a hard round to the shoulder. It opens up like a flower and she reels, screams with obvious rage, straightens back up for a moment and then drops to all fours like a dog.

She’s terrifying like that, crouched on all fours in the mud, rain and blood and dirt on her face, curtain of dark hair and those scars under her eyes, and Levi has one singular moment to be supremely unnerved and then she’s coming for them.

Death takes her, goes to cut her fast and easy but the - _girl_ \- she looks _young_ \- is closing the distance too fast, Death’s sword is too long for close-range fighting, so she stabs it into the mud and rolls with her into the wet grass.

Levi looks back up to find the other three still there, coming for them now. The one who walks like a boulder is headed straight for Hope, even points at him, and Hope barks a laugh that sends a shot of pure terror into Levi’s heart and then lunges for him.

That leaves Levi with two.

The tall one is slow, though his reach far exceeds Levi’s, even with the swords, so Levi uses that to his advantage. He spins and kicks at the shins, feels one break and hears the man grunt, then goes for his gut with one of his swords.

Another sniper shot sounds, but the acoustics are off, like it’s pointing the wrong direction. Something _squirms_ horribly in Levi’s stomach.

The camp -

A peal of thunder rolls through the muddy ground again, and in a split second Levi can smell the quiet green of the wet leaves and hear nothing but the pounding, endless rain and something - something _coming_ -

He barely turns his head, just brings the other sword up behind his back blind, just in time to stop the blonde woman’s weapon, inches from cutting across his shoulders. The blade of it is chipped and rusted, cracked in places. It is so close to the back of Levi’s neck. Even as he shakes to hold his own sword against it, to stop it from connecting, he can feel the rain bouncing off the rusted steel and spraying the back of his ear.

Two shots ring out at once. One hits someone in the grass - Levi prays it’s not Death - and the other hits the blonde in the face.

Her nose is gone. It just blows away, leaving a wide, gaping hole in its place, and Levi can’t help it, he turns to look, and that’s when the tall one hits him.

He kicks Levi in the torso so hard all the breath leaves his lungs.

His foot connects and cracks ribs, and there’s a translucent, strangling shock of pain behind his eyes and his lungs feel like they’re folding in on themselves, and the force of it throws Levi to the side into the blonde woman, and even as he tries and fails to draw a breath he sinks his short knife into the flesh of her throat and wrenches it sideways.

They both collapse. She doesn’t move again.

Levi feels like something very heavy is resting on his chest and the tall one is coming for him again - he has to get up but he can’t - he can’t breathe -

No shot sounds. No one is coming to save him.

_Where_ is Erwin -

Death comes out of nowhere, blood on her hands and her face and in her hair, and cuts a long line of deep red up the backs of the tall Titan’s legs. The legs crumble under him, huge body crashing into the mud in time with a colossal flash of lightning, and as he goes down he grabs Death’s ankle and snaps it in his hands.

She screams.

Levi hauls himself to his feet and jumps, weightless for one silent over-long moment, suspended with the drops of rain before he lands hard, blades first, feels his swords sinking into the tall one’s shoulders and twists, pulls them through flesh with everything he has and the tendons sever, bones splinter, the swords cut from the shoulders all the way across to the spine and stop, held by the tension of so much tissue all bunched up in one place, and then Levi makes a sound like an animal howling and feels the spinal cord finally snap like a wire under the steel.

It is quiet, for a moment. Too quiet.

Then, in the distance, _behind them_ in the camp, there is gunfire. Levi turns.

The gates are wide open. There is screaming.

_Erwin_.

How many of them are in there?

It doesn’t matter how skilled they are, it doesn’t matter that they have killed their most dangerous carriers, if there are a hundred mindless monsters for every ten humans the camp doesn’t stand a chance.

Death’s ankle is stuck at the wrong angle but she gets up anyway, tries to lean on her sword; it sinks easily into the mud. There are streaks of brown and red and pink on her face. She’s looking around, expression wild, blind to the fact that she can’t stand, that there’s a long gash across her chest seeping into her shirt, that her foot is sideways.

She screams, “Eren!” and the panicked sound of it is so animal, so utterly terrified, that Levi swears the rain itself stops for a moment.

More gunshots from the camp, distant. The pile of corpses is still steaming. The rain is freezing on Levi’s face, his hands, numbing his fingers where they grip his swords.

Somewhere in the brush Hope grunts, rolls to his feet. The Titan with the short hair is crushing the grass, motionless. His face is unrecognizable.

Hope has a black eye, all purple in the socket, veins in the white of it dark red and broken. His arm looks - off, sticking out at a sick angle. He’s holding it.

“Shoulder’s dislocated,” he grits through his teeth, less like he’s in pain and more like he’s angry. Death makes a noise.

Levi motions for him and Hope staggers over, clearly exhausted, bruises and cuts all over his skin, shoulder in the wrong place. He’s breathing shallow and fast, and Levi knows he’s broken ribs.

The rain still hasn’t let up, and the three of them just stand there for a moment, breathing hard, drowning. There’s blood in the mud at their feet.

Levi looks at Hope for a moment, then sets one hand against Hope’s back and the other hand on the front of his shoulder. He hasn’t done this in a long time. It feels a lifetime away,the last time he did this and he can see it. Farlan, grinning, sitting on his kitchen counter with a split lip and a bottle of whiskey, arm dangling uselessly to the side.

He nods at Hope once, then shoves.

There’s a grinding feeling when he pushes, like he hasn’t pushed _quite_ right, and Hope groans, but then it’s slotting back into the spot where it’s meant to be.

Hope’s expression eases a little and he looks at Levi. “Thanks.”

Levi nods again, pushes his hair off his face for the hundredth time.

“Are they dead?” Death asks, shoving the tall one by Levi’s feet with her sword. Her face is so pale. She winces every time her weight shifts.

Levi isn’t listening. He’s turned toward the camp, straining to hear something, anything, Erwin’s face stuck in his mind.

Something snaps in the trees, and before he’s thought it all the way through Levi’s grabbing Death and Hope by the back of the neck and shoving them to the ground.

The gunfire misses them by inches, and Levi rolls, makes for an overturned Jeep some 20 feet left of the gate. He just has to trust that the other two are with him.

They are. The three of them slam their backs against the undercarriage of the Jeep, narrowly avoiding another hail of bullets. Death makes a terrible sound, instinctively grabs at her leg with both hands. The bone is stretching the skin of her ankle; not quite breaking through but close, and it makes Levi sick to look at. The foot is off to the side, swollen.

Hope curses so viciously Levi actually raises his eyebrows at him for a moment, and then the bullets stop and Levi chances a look.

It’s just one man.

Just - one single man, and he looks so - _unassuming_ , with a scruffy brown beard and dirty round wire glasses, except that he’s armed to the fucking teeth.

He doesn’t have _time_ for this. The camp is chillingly quiet behind them. He needs to get in there. He needs to get to Erwin, to know he’s alive.

The man - he’s got the same scars under his eyes as the other four - has a machine gun in his hands, another strapped to his back, and a pistol at his hip. There’s a knife strapped to his leg that’s long and serrated and clearly for cutting meat and it turns Levi’s stomach.

He doesn’t know what to do here. He looks over at Death and Hope, but both of them look the same. Clueless. Helpless, against ammunition like that. Death’s expression is tight, her face pale and drawn. Hope’s black eye is swelling.

The bullets start again, and Levi crouches with one hand over Hope’s head and one hand over Death’s, pushing their heads down like he could save them, like he could do _anything_ against this, like he has _any_ chance of protecting them.

_Please, they’re just - kids -_

Finally, there’s the distinct click of an empty magazine and Levi peers around again to see the Titan - and he is _the_ Titan, Levi just knows this somehow - throwing the machine gun into the woods. He gets the other one from behind his back and Levi takes a deep, slow breath.

The Jeep isn’t going to last. It’s full of little holes; the rusted sheet metal of the doors and roof are destroyed. He doesn’t know how long it will protect them.

Erwin’s gunshots have stopped coming. Levi feels like his chest is turned inside out when he thinks about that.

Suddenly, Death inhales sharply next to him and points.

There’s a grenade. It’s just laying in the grass, not ten feet from the Jeep, and Levi feels a white, freezing shock of fear before he realizes the pin is still in it.

They can use this.

“Distraction,” Levi says softly, and Death nods. She reaches into her boot - the good foot - and pulls out three small throwing knives.

Very quietly, Hope says, “Don’t miss, Meeks.”

Jesus. This kid’s got a knife against a fully automatic machine gun. Levi looks at her for a moment, but the vertigo he gets from her expression tells him she won’t miss.

After all, he wouldn’t.

The rain’s let up just enough to increase visibility, but her hands are still wet and slippery on the handles of the knives.

Death straightens up a little, takes a deep breath, reaches and touches the back of Hope’s hand for a half-second. Then she ducks out of the cover of the Jeep, still on her knees, and throws.

There’s a surprised sound, then a grunt, and in that single moment she throws again.

Levi doesn’t wait to see if she makes that one. He lunges for the grenade.

There’s a scream, a short, pained one, and Levi looks up to see that Death hit the Titan in the _eye_ with one of them.

It’s -

God, there’s so much blood, and the Titan’s already wrenching the knife out and throwing it to the side -  

Levi’s fingers close around the grenade and he throws himself back behind the cover just as the Titan lets loose an animal bellow and a spray of haphazard bullets.

The Titan’s still yelling, still shooting, and most of his shots are wild and off-base, shooting off into the trees, into the air.

Levi cannot think about Erwin. He’d promised that he would protect himself. He’d _promised._

Levi’s insides are frozen but his hands are steady as he inspects the grenade.

This is it. This is all they’ve got.

The second machine gun clicks empty, and all three of them are still alive. It’s better than Levi expected.

Hope’s eyes are bright with that strange, feverish hate when he says, “I can take him.”

Levi shakes his head viciously, but Hope is already getting up, already loading his pistol.

Death’s face goes bone white when he stands.

“Eren.”

Before he can go Levi rips the pin out of the grenade and hurls it over the Jeep in the Titan’s direction. Hope has no choice but to duck back down for cover.

It explodes. He has no idea if it’s hit anything, but it explodes, and the force rocks the ground, and the thunder rolls over their heads, and the shockwave of the grenade tips the Jeep forward.

Levi scrambles out of the way, feels something _twist_ in his shoulder, white hot and sharp but he ignores it, keeps going, keeping the Jeep between himself and the Titan. It crashes back onto all four wheels just inches from his legs. Death does the same, keeps next to Levi, making a terrible, feeble whimpering sound as she lands wrong on her ankle. Her head whips to his other side in an eyeblink, and then she’s screaming.

“Eren!”

Levi looks around wildly, tries to tell him to _stop_ , that this is suicide, that he can’t take that man on his own, but he loses the shape of Hope’s back in the rain.

Death sobs.

“ _Eren._ ”

Hope disappears into the woods.

There’s no sound for a moment, and then there are two frantic gun shots somewhere off ahead, in the woods, one after the other. Death rolls to the left, into the exposed grass, hyperventilating. Her hands are shaking. Levi takes a breath and follows her.

He can’t see anything for a moment.

The rain’s picking up again, making everything foggy and gray and hard to make out, and there are just - body parts. Everywhere.

The grenade must have landed in the pile of corpses, then. _No, don’t think of that now_.

Death crawls, bone of her ankle finally poked through, yelling Hope’s name into the screaming grey storm, and Levi feels an almost overwhelming desire to protect them. He puts his back to her and squints into the woods.

When he finds Hope, it is with his back to a tree, staining the bark black with blood. He’s been shot. It’s just through the shoulder - he’ll be fine -  but he’s been shot. Levi crouches in front of him.

“I got him,” Eren says, voice rough. He grins.

“Idiot.” Levi looks around. The bark of the tree looks familiar. Why -

Right. His dreams. All that blood, all those roots.

“Stay here.”

Hope nods, gestures to his empty magazine as if to say, _I got nothing anyway._

Levi turns back to the woods, but they’re silent. Still, save for the hissing storm and Levi’s own labored breathing. He looks to camp, where he can hear - distantly - yelling. Shooting. Screaming.

_Erwin_.

He knows, then. He’s turning toward the camp before he’s really processed it, before he can let himself panic at the thought of it.

The camp gates are open. And the Titan is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guys i'm SO sorry this took so long. i swear the next chapter is already half written so i wont do this to you again. also, i'm adding another chapter. oops. its gonna be 12.  
> love you all so much, god. you're being so fuckin chill about this bloodbath of a fic.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Like the terrestrial crust of the earth which is proportionately 10 times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul is a miracle of mutual pressures. Millions of kilograms of force pounding up from earth’s core on the inside to meet the cold air of the world and stop as we do, just in time.”  
> ― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is it, guys.

 

The camp is pandemonium.

There are cannibals all over the place; some staggering toward people too frightened to defend themselves, most just crawling on the ground with their insides out.

Levi cuts down at least ten more in a muddy square that used to be a street, now certain the scramble from the falling Jeep dislocated his shoulder, before his eyes fall on a familiar face.

The other sniper.

She's got her rifle strapped to her back - it clearly isn't good for close quarters - and she's shooting them through the skulls, a pistol in each hand. There's blood on her face and viscera in her hair, and the waning rain is doing nothing to wash it away.

Erwin's not with her.

Levi's feels the lining of his stomach freeze into solid ice and tries desperately to remember her name.

"Sasha!"

The sniper turns, looks at Levi, and points her gun at him. Levi hits the ground and she fires over his head, gets one that Levi had turned his back to.

They're slow, the ones in the camp. Deteriorated. Half-dead.

But there are so many of them. Their corpses are thick on the ground. The whole camp smells rusty and sick; red and wet. Like a slaughterhouse.

Levi goes over to her and says, "Where's Erwin."

Sasha shakes her head, shooting another. She clips it in the eye but misses the base of the brain and Levi spins, cuts off its head and kicks the head into the side of a building. His shoulder isn’t moving quite right, but it still works.

"Dunno," she says, eyes focused. She's an incredibly accurate shot. Nearly as good as Erwin. "We got separated once they got in."

He knows. He already knows this. But it still freezes him.

"Fuck."

The camp is full of gunfire, and the soft grey mist of a tapering storm, and the steam of feverish, too-hot corpses.

They're making headway. Levi looks around.

There are only a few left now; there's a bottleneck between two buildings and Hanji is there, hurling grenades and smashing skulls with an axe, expression entirely too gleeful. Levi turns left and sees the camp's town square, where he can just make out Control's vague shape and hear his voice barking orders. The gunfire slows. No more come through the camp gates.

Levi turns back to Sasha and says, "You got it?"

She nods, reloads her gun and cocks it. Her eyes are on the open gates. "Yeah, I got it here. Go."

He goes to the clock tower without a second thought.

It's empty. Abandoned. The little buildings with their open windows, the laundry lines and the well of water and the overturned bucket make Levi's stomach squirm. Hours ago, people were living here.

It's deathly quiet. There are a few more shots off to his right, in the direction of the gate, but otherwise almost silent.

"Erwin!"

No answer. Nothing.

Levi feels his heart start to speed up. He's so tired.

" _Erwin_."

Please. Please.

There's nothing.

The grip Levi has on his swords loosens a little. The mist of rain that used to be the storm is freezing, exhausting in its softness, leaves tiny silver droplets on the edges of the steel, on his eyelashes, on the ends of his hair. It's so quiet. So grey.  

He wants to sit down. It's so quiet. He's so tired.

"Erwin. Erwin."

Please.

He sees something then, just at the corner of the clock tower. His feet take him there, every step cold and bloody and tired. The adrenaline is leaching out of him too fast, not yet, _not yet_ , he needs -

_Where is he -_

He reaches the corner of the clock tower and finds Erwin's sniper rifle, thrown on the ground, laying on its side in the mud. There's a fine silver coating of rain across the long barrel.  
Levi's lungs shrink in his chest.

_Please_.

Don't die. Don't die.

There's a gunshot. Very close. Too close.

Levi rounds the clock tower and peers down an alley, sees two figures in the dirt, covered in mud.

The first is the Titan, kneeling and bleeding from a hole in his shoulder - _Hope_ , Levi thinks - and struggling to point a pistol at the forehead of the second.

The second is on his back fighting him off, spray of mud on his face where the shot barely missed him and hit the ground, pushing the barrel away with his only hand.

Erwin.

Levi feels his exhaustion, all his pains - his cracked ribs, the dislocated shoulder, all the bruises - evaporate in half a second. One thought consumes him from the inside out, like the blooming orange flame of an explosion. He voices it, and barely recognizes the feral sound that comes out of his mouth as belonging to him.

"Get your filthy hands off him."

The Titan looks up, bleeding from one ruined eye - _Death’s knife_ \- and the other faintly surprised, and Erwin finally manages to wrench the gun out of the Titan's grasp and throw it. It bounces off the alley wall and goes off when it lands, making another hole in the mud.

The Titan turns back to Erwin, and Levi's closing the distance fast but not fast enough to stop him from grabbing Erwin's throat and squeezing brutally hard. He speaks loud enough for Levi to hear.

"Do you want to know how your arm tasted?"

Levi feels the breath leave his lungs even as he runs and Erwin freezes, just for a moment, but it's long enough for the Titan to get his other hand around Erwin's throat. His grip is too good. He has the high ground. He's going to kill him, he's going to kill him _so fast like this_ -

It takes an eternity to get there. Levi feels himself moving through quicksand, like the seconds are all drawn-out and twisted up. Erwin's eyes are already pink, now purple, and he's kicking and twisting but there's nothing he can -

Levi gets there.

His entire body is screaming to rip this thing limb from fucking limb, and he is so full of hate and rage that he throws down his swords and launches himself at the Titan with just his bare hands.

He wants to feel this.

He can still feel his dislocated shoulder, a dull grinding sort of pain when he lands on the Titan's back, wrenches him off Erwin and throws him in an arc into the mud. He takes one single second to look at Erwin -

\- coughing, breathing, finally, yes, _yes_ , thank you, God, he's breathing -

\- and then he's throwing his whole battered body into the mud and rolling, pulling the Titan with him, away from Erwin and further down the alley.

It's just them now. Just Levi, and the soft rain, and the slaughterhouse-floor smell of the camp, and the _filthy son of a bitch_ who ate Erwin's arm.

He doesn't care that this is the person who followed them. He doesn't care that this is the person who made all those awful monsters laying in decaying piles outside. He doesn't care that this whole thing was planned, orchestrated, by this one single source of intelligence and malice, that ending him will end all of this, that he shot Hope -

He doesn't care. In that moment, he cares only about two things. He can see them, over and over and over again: the barrel of the pistol half an inch from Erwin's face, and that godforsaken arm over that fire.

Levi has never felt hate like this in his life.

He wraps himself around the Titan in an instant, fast and brutal and gets an elbow to the Titan's jaw, another to his ear, breaks or dislocates an arm before the Titan has a chance to react.

Grappling has always been Levi's strong suit. He knows how small he is, how fast, and he's always used that to his advantage, but -

But he hesitates just a fraction of a second when a rock on the ground digs into his cracked rib and that's all it takes.

He hears Erwin scream before he feels the knife himself, but only a second before. Then it's just red, searing pain all the way up his forearm, tearing through muscles and tendons in one long, deep curve to his elbow.

He feels it hit bone. Someone else screams, it could be him, but he isn't sure. He's still hardly in his own body, so full of transcendent rage he almost feels invincible.

The knife is still embedded in his arm even as he raises it to punch the Titan in the face.

He will _never_ touch Erwin again.

His hand doesn't work the way he wants it to with the muscles cut like this, so he switches and wraps both legs around the Titan's torso, twists his body and ignores his ribs and his shoulder and throws the other arm, connects an elbow savagely with the side of the Titan's face.

Something _gives_ under the Titan's skin and part of his face caves, cheekbone and eye socket broken. He's still bleeding from the eye where Death hit him with the knife. It's the same eye. Levi turns his head and elbows him in the same spot again, squeezes his eyes and mouth shut as the bone goes from broken to shattered like a windshield, avoids the blood that drips off the Titan's face and onto the ground.

The Titan makes a noise like a wounded animal and Levi's still trying to avoid the blood, and then there's a knee coming up and connecting with his broken ribs, and he's never felt pain like this, his whole body hurts, everything in him is straining and shaking and screaming _You will never touch Erwin again_ and they're both scrambling for survival, desperately, rolling in the mud like wild animals and neither of them are going to make it, Levi's going to die here and he's going to take this _thing_ with him -

Erwin makes a noise somewhere above his head, a shuddering gasp, still trying to regain his breath after having his windpipe so brutally crushed, and Levi realizes it's only been _seconds_ since this started -

\- and then he realizes that he can't die, he can't, not like this, not right in front of Erwin.

The Titan's still got Levi on his back and he's still throwing vicious, heavy-landing punches at his torso, hitting his liver and his kidneys and his cracked ribs with bone-shaking thuds of pain, but Levi can't die like this.

_Don't die._

He rolls. Wraps his legs tightly around the thing's bloody torso and heaves with his whole broken body, gets himself on top and throws another elbow at the Titan's jaw with all the strength he has left, and it connects with a sickening crunch.

There's one second where the Titan reels from it. It's all Levi needs.

He reaches into empty air, blind, not even sure what he's searching for, hand scrabbling and then Erwin is throwing something at him and he catches it, feels the handle of a long hunting knife in his fingers, spares one single thought of _of course Erwin understands_ before sinking it into the Titan's neck.

It goes into the side so easily it makes Levi want to be sick but he doesn't stop, pulls it through muscles and tendons and straining, deadly, poisonous veins and twists it with a vicious snarl he doesn't even recognize as his own voice. Something snaps and the thing under him finally, finally goes still.

Levi releases a long breath and collapses into the mud.

His ears won’t stop ringing, and he’s _so_ tired, and everything is fading into the soft fuzz of unconsciousness at the corners, and then Erwin is hauling him upright and pulling him to sit against the wall, crawling to him in the mud and pressing their foreheads together.

_Don’t die._

He didn’t. They didn’t.

Erwin’s shaking, clothes utterly soaked through with rainwater and dirt and blood, and Levi gently pushes at Erwin’s chest so he can get a good look at him.

“You’re alive,” he says, or tries to say.

He’s _gasping_ , can’t get his breath all the way into his lungs, and his words come out all soft and breathy and exhausted. He can’t say anything else. He fists both hands in the front of Erwin’s soaked shirt.

Erwin’s already got a ring of bruises around his throat. The sight of it makes Levi want to get up and chop the corpse nearby into little pieces.

_PieceofshitTitanbastard –_

Erwin is so close to him, both of them crumpled on the ground against the wall, barely holding each other up. The camp is finally silent.

Erwin puts his hand on Levi’s neck, and his fingers are freezing from the rain and covered in mud, but it doesn’t matter when Erwin looks him full in the face and says, without preamble or hesitation, “I love you.”

His voice hardly even comes out, just a soft rasp and even as Levi winces for Erwin’s bruised throat something unavoidably warm devastates his chest.

Levi is exhausted to his bones. He can hardly summon the energy to keep breathing, and yet the sound of that is so shocking and so unexpected he feels his frozen body flush with a slow, crawling heat from the back of his neck to the arches of his feet.

He blinks, breath still coming too fast. Now that the Titan is dead Levi can’t get his heart to slow down. He feels like he’s run a marathon. He just stares at Erwin, silent.

Erwin is covered in dirt and there are bruises all over him but his eyes are the brightest thing Levi’s ever seen. The sky, the mud, the water, the corpses. All of it gray, all of it dull and soft but not this - Erwin’s eyes are terrifying in their clarity, like a bright light, like a bolt of lightning. Like a shock of freezing water after dying in the desert.

They can’t take their eyes off each other. Levi feels like he’s drowning.

Erwin curls his muddy hand into Levi’s hair and pulls him closer, till Levi can feel their breath warming the same air. He’s so cold and all the places they are touching are so wonderfully warm.

He’s so tired. A slow, syrupy roll of heat works its way through Levi’s blood when Erwin says it again.

“Levi. I love you.”

He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He is utterly wrung dry. Instead he makes something that sounds very much like a sob and falls forward into Erwin’s chest, presses his face against Erwin’s freezing, wet shirt and crushes himself to him as close as possible.

Erwin just shifts closer, and closer, and _closer_ and the rain stops, the mud disappears, the smell of the blood and the corpses falls away into nothing.

“I love you.” He whispers it this time, like it’s not even for Levi to hear.

It’s just this. It’s just this single moment of gold flickering warmth in the middle of the storm, just this like holding a candle to the cold gray mist, and Erwin’s steady breathing and the thrum of aching, indefinable pain in Levi’s chest when he touches him.

“Stay with me,” Levi hears himself say, ears ringing louder now.

Erwin doesn’t say anything, but when Levi feels himself slipping into something blue and cottony that must be unconsciousness, he can still hear the beat of Erwin’s heart in his ear.

 

He ends up in a hospital bed, again.

Alive, somehow. Breathing.

He turns his head and Erwin’s there, asleep, in a bed next to him.

Hanji comes in then, with a black eye behind dirty, scratched glasses, bruised knuckles and arm in a sling. They grin at Levi when they see he’s awake.

“I come bearing news,” Hanji says, too loud, and Erwin starts awake.

Levi takes a long moment to just look at him, to watch him blinking sleepily around the room, hair matted with mud and cuts all smeared hastily with iodine.

God, Levi loves him. It hurts.

Erwin’s lips turn up just the slightest bit, like he’s too tired to smile all the way, and he gives Levi a tiny little nod.

“So! News.”

Something about the tone of Hanji’s voice - _gleefully_ curious - makes Levi apprehensive.

“About?”

“Whether or not you two were infected by tainted blood during the fight.”

Shit. He hadn’t considered that.

He’d thought - he’d thought this was it, that they were - they were finally safe now, that it was over - if it -

“You’re clear,” Hanji says with a wave of their hand, after a terrible pause to allow Levi’s thoughts to spiral into a blind panic.

Levi lifts one of the pillows from behind his head and throws it at Hanji.

“Goddamn it, lead with that.”

Erwin wheezes something that might be a laugh, and Levi looks at him. Hanji tuts.

“No speaking for you, Erwin. Not for a few days. Your windpipe’s shit.”

Erwin rolls his eyes and lets his head thunk back against the pillow. It’s so normal, so petulant and bratty and _ordinary_ that Levi feels himself loosening a little. Not quite a smile, but something unwinding a bit in his coil-tight chest.

“What if it’s important?” Erwin whispers, and Levi feels the coil in his chest let go a little more at the sound of his voice.

“Keep it to a minimum,” Hanji concedes. “Listen, you two are basically fine to go, I’ve got some antibiotics for you and stuff and that’s about it.” They sigh heavily and give Levi the sort of glare a teacher might give an unruly student. “ _But_ , you really did a number on yourselves taking out that carrier and you’re in no condition to help with construction right now, so I want you to sleep here tonight.”

Levi shares a look with Erwin and says, “Construction?”

Hanji shrugs, then winces at the arm they have in the sling as if they’ve forgotten it’s there.

“Well, I blew up the community kitchen with a grenade.” At this Hanji can’t seem to suppress a grin, then they continue with a somewhat sterner look on their face, “ _You_ blew up part of the front gate when you blew up the Jeep, there are unsanitary diseased corpses in the street, and most of the rest of the buildings are - just - totally riddled with bullet holes.”

Oh. Right.

Levi looks at Erwin again, and Erwin shrugs, looking a little sheepish. Levi’s dizzy with how relieved he is; he can hardly believe they’re alive.

“Woops,” Erwin rasps, near silently.

Hanji barks a laugh before remembering that Erwin’s not supposed to speak and fixing him with a disapproving look.

“Thank you,” Erwin whispers to Hanji, face utterly sincere. Levi feels a fizz of shame in the pit of his stomach for failing to say it.

“Yeah, shit, Four-Eyes, you look like shit.” He gestures to the chair in the room. “You should sit. Quit saving our sorry asses.”

Hanji blinks at Levi, then turns to Erwin and says, “Is that his way of thanking me for tending to you despite my own injuries?”

“ _He_ is right _here_ , you know,” Levi growls, just as Erwin bites his lip to keep from smiling and then nods sagely.

“Well,” Hanji says, turning to Levi and clapping their hands together, “I’m going to go somewhere else now. There’s a shower in there -” they point to a door in the corner - “With soap and whatnot. Erwin, your shoulder should be healed enough for a shower if you’d like one. Levi, you’re covered in blood and you reek, get in there.”

Levi rolls his eyes but feels his heartbeat speed up at the prospect of a shower. Of being clean, with _soap_ , holy shit -

On the way out, Hanji ducks back in the door and says, “Armin’s an engineering genius; you can thank him for the hot water.”

_Hot water -_

“Oh, my god,” Levi hears himself say without being able to stop it.

Erwin raises an eyebrow at him and Levi gets gingerly out of bed.

“What?”

Hoarsely, Erwin whispers, “Oh, nothing. Just - you sounded, uh. _Very_ pleased about the shower.”

Levi walks over to Erwin’s bed and helps him up. Every part of his body hurts in a dull, exhausted sort of way. He’s still so cold.

“You bet your sweet ass I’m _very pleased_.” He wraps an arm around Erwin’s waist despite the fact that Erwin can probably walk to the bathroom just fine. “Hot water, Erwin.”

He nods emphatically, as if to say, _I know, I heard._

“ _Soap_ , Erwin.”

Erwin snorts a little laugh and they stumble into the bathroom together.

“After you,” Erwin says quietly, and Levi huffs and rolls his eyes and pulls Erwin into the stall with him.

Levi can’t even wait to take his own clothes off, he’s so eager to turn the hot water on. The spray hits them both and it’s cold but still not as cold as the rain was, and then it gets warmer and warmer and starts to soak through the fabric of Levi’s shirt, stiff with mud and things he doesn’t want to think about anymore.

Once it touches his skin, seeps through his clothes slow and _so warm_ , Levi feels his knees shake.

“Oh, Jesus Christ.”

Erwin seems to agree. For a few minutes, the two of them just sag against the wall while the water rinses the filth off their clothes, steam rising in beautiful, hot, _clean_ plumes around them.

Levi’s stomach clenches. He wants to laugh, it feels so good. His muscles ache, his bruises ache, his joints jammed back together all ache. He looks at Erwin - hair plastered straight down to his forehead, exhausted smile on his face - and his heart aches.

The water’s so warm now, and Levi reaches forward silently and pulls off Erwin’s shirt.

Erwin doesn’t make a sound, just pushes his wet hair out of his face and watches Levi. Levi can feel the weight of his eyes on him when he goes for Erwin’s pants, wet fingers fumbling on the mud-stiff button before the water washes it away.

He sinks very slowly to his knees to peel the clothes off and still they don’t speak, Erwin stepping silently out of his pants when Levi prompts him to. He puts his hand on Levi’s shoulder to steady himself and Levi falters, dizzy at the contact. He looks up.

He’d forgotten, almost, how painfully beautiful Erwin was naked like this, and just watches the warm water roll down his skin for a few moments.

“God,” Levi murmurs, and the sound of the shower hides it.

He stands up and still they don’t speak; he goes for his own soaked shirt and peels it off with his eyes silent on Erwin’s, groans a little at the feeling of the hot water hitting his bare skin.

His pants get stuck around one of his feet, soaked and ruined and muddy as they are, and Levi stumbles a little. Erwin catches him and they laugh, both of them, just a little but it’s _there_ , it’s warm and real and for a moment Levi’s chest is utterly weightless.

They wash each other, take entirely too long to do it and still don’t speak, don’t make a sound, hardly ever break eye contact. The water is so warm Levi feels like he might come just from that, just from the heat and the feeling of finally, _finally_ being clean.

He sighs when Erwin sinks his fingers into his hair and washes Levi’s hair one-handed, leans back against Erwin’s chest and revels in his tall he is, how solid his chest is, how _alive_ Erwin’s heartbeat feels under all that beautiful warm wet skin.

Erwin tips Levi’s head back to rinse the soap out and Levi closes his eyes, feels so clean he wants to sob from the relief of it.

Erwin’s hoarse, crushed-windpipe voice whispers, “Lee,” and Levi feels something in his chest give an excruciating squeeze and then he’s kissing him.

It’s easy, and it hurts, and Levi never wants it to stop.

He avoids the place where Erwin’s shoulder is still trying to heal back onto itself, pink and angry looking, for fear of hurting him. But his hands are everywhere else. He can’t stop touching.

It’s slow, though. Different than before.

They are too tired, too sore, too hurt together for hard or fast or hurried. Levi goes up on his toes and Erwin pushes him so gently up against the tile and there’s so much steam it’s hard to breathe, and their lips are so warm and Erwin tastes so unbelievably good. They take their time, lips and tongues slow and lazy and soft, hands gentle and soapy when they slide all over each other, like this is the first time and the thousandth time all at once.

They shatter, slowly, softly, the gentleness breaking Levi apart and he buries his face in Erwin’s wet chest and wraps both arms around him and just holds him there, trying to put all the aching parts of himself back together.

Erwin’s fingers are lazy and warm against his spine, following the path of hot water as it bumps down each vertebrae, and Levi drags his lips from Erwin’s shoulder up to his neck, kisses the ring of purple bruises at his throat, licks at the clean warm water running off his jaw and then says very softly into his ear, “Please, I want -”

He cuts himself off, like a reflex, like a turtle shrinking into its shell, before he realizes he’s too tired, too broken open for that.

He doesn’t have the energy to pretend anymore.

“I - I need you to -”

Erwin is patient with him, letting him stumble over this new vulnerability in silence, skimming his lips warmly across the side of Levi’s face.

“I want you to touch me,” Levi finally says. “I want you to -”

Erwin’s voice suddenly drops an octave and rumbles lower than Levi’s ever heard it, “Say it, Lee.”

“Fuck me.”

Both of them sag into each other at that, Erwin from the words and Levi from the _devastating_ vulnerability of speaking them.

Erwin’s fingers dig in _hard_ at Levi’s hip, bruising, and it’s so different from all Levi’s other bruises that he wants to sob in gratitude.

Erwin doesn’t say anything, and they stand there for another minute before Levi turns to look at him through the steam.

He is so devastatingly beautiful. His hair is so long now, and wet from the shower it’s this dark gold color, like clover honey. His eyelashes are dark and wet and all stuck together, and the curve of his neck makes Levi want to shake apart into nothing.

He is everything, _everything_ Levi can ever imagine wanting for the rest of his life. He looks like the fucking sun itself, freckles scattered fine and golden over his shoulders and collarbone, scars peppering his torso. Scars he’s let Levi run his hands over, mapping every tragedy and mistake, shaking with the weight of such open trust, of being so utterly naked.  

“I, uh.”

This is impossible. How had Erwin just said it like that?

He clears his throat and tries again, but he can’t seem to make himself do it, so instead he just says, “Erwin.”

Erwin touches the side of his face, pushes the warm wet hair off Levi’s forehead and trails his fingers down the back of his neck. One side of his lips pull up and he mouths the words _I know_.

Something between them shifts in an instant. Levi’s fingers and toes are tingling from the warmth of the water, his skin is humming from the feeling of finally being clean, his bones and muscles ache, and yet in that moment he is consumed by something so hot he can hardly name it. It steals everything from him. He can’t feel his feet on the floor, he can’t feel the bruises across his torso, he can’t feel the bone-deep trench of red and stitches on his forearm.

Of course Erwin knows. Of course. He always knows.

He sighs, a strange mix of exhaustion and relief and exhilaration warring in his chest, and leans on Erwin again.

It’s so quiet; nothing but the hiss of the miracle of the shower and their quiet, slow breathing and Levi’s frantically pounding heart. This safety and warmth feels wrong after so much blood and fear, like they can’t possibly be allowed to have this, and some bone-tired part of him is still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But the rest of him is blessedly, uncharacteristically silent. There is nothing in his head except this, the way his fingertips catch over Erwin’s clean, wet skin, the spray of tiny droplets that bounce off Erwin’s head and land in a fine warm mist on Levi’s eyelashes, the gentle, deliberate way Erwin’s fingers trace his body, looking for more injuries.

He almost believes that if Erwin lays his warm gold fingers on him just right, all Levi’s bruises, cuts, and fractured bones will knit themselves together in one single divine breath.

_God of healing._

He does feel healed. He looks up at Erwin again and his breath stops in his throat, like it always does. Every single time.

Erwin’s brows knit together for a second and then he laughs, low and soft and straight through Levi’s over-warm body, before he reaches behind Levi and grabs something on the caddy under the shower head.

He holds it up for Levi to see and Levi huffs out a disbelieving laugh himself.

It’s a little bottle very helpfully labeled _Personal lubricant._ Not exactly a standard apocalyptic shower staple.

“Hanji,” Levi hisses, half in thanks and half in frustration.

Erwin doesn’t say anything, but he’s still chuckling when he kisses the side of Levi’s face. They breathe together, holding onto each other and half-smiling.  
Something lifts off of the both of them in that moment.

Finally, finally, after weeks, months, maybe _years_ of constant fear, Levi lets himself believe that they might actually be safe. Finally.

He sinks very slowly to his knees on the floor of the shower, then looks up at Erwin and says, “Come here.”

Erwin nearly falls in his haste to obey, then rolls his eyes and stands back up, directs the shower head away from them and sits back down on the floor again with his back to the wall.

They’re quiet when Levi moves to straddle him like this, breath slow and steady and full of steam and warmth. He scoots very close, and the floor hurts his tired knees but the rest of him feels so good like this, he’s so _warm_ and he can feel so much of Erwin this way, chests pressed together all wet and clean and wonderful.

“Hey,” Levi murmurs very quietly into Erwin’s ear, both hands on his chest, and Erwin rumbles half a reply before he cuts off with a gasp of shock when Levi’s hand disappears behind himself.

He’s grateful for Erwin moving the shower head off them; the lube is _wonderful_ but never would have stood up to the water -

God but it’s _good_ , it’s been so long, _so_ long since he did this -

“Fucking better than cooking oil,” he slurs darkly, forehead pressed between Erwin’s shoulder and his neck. He can smell him, and he’s never smelled him so clean like this and it’s strange, without that ever-present blood and sweat he smells like a sunbeam, like the ocean, like standing in the middle of a field of wheat during a thunderstorm -

“Shit,” Levi curses when he adds a second finger, “You smell fucking good.”

Erwin whines softly under him, clearly overwhelmed by Levi prepping himself right on top of him like this, and balls his hand up into a fist to avoid touching and _god_ that’s -

He’s so _good_ -

Levi stops but doesn’t pull his fingers out, just pauses, adjusts himself on his knees and grabs Erwin’s wrist with his free hand.

Erwin makes a short, low sound that cracks and cuts off. Levi wants to see his face _so_ badly but he can’t, he can’t, he has to stay here, just like this, with his face buried in the side of Erwin’s neck.

He guides Erwin’s fingers back and feels a tremor rock through Erwin’s whole body when he feels that Levi’s still got his own fingers inside himself.

“With me,” Levi says, soft, voice higher than he means for it to be. “Please?”

Erwin responds by shaking violently, silently turning his head into Levi’s shoulder and biting it _hard_ , sinking his teeth in deep and moaning.

Shit.

Erwin doesn’t hesitate once Levi blindly drizzles lube all over his fingers; he sinks one in all the way to the second knuckle and Levi can’t stop the noise he makes, he can feel it from so many different parts of himself, their fingers are all tangled together and they’re so warm in him like this and - and _god_ , it’s been so _long_ and Erwin is so _perfect_ -

Erwin sits up a little, so that Levi throws his free hand over Erwin’s shoulders for balance, and when they both pull their fingers out at the same time Erwin twists them together, two of his and two of Levi’s, and their fingers are so slick when they slide against each other it makes Levi flush before they’re even inside him.

Erwin’s running it now, and he pushes Levi’s fingers as well as his own back up against Levi’s hole and leaves them there, just rubs gently over and over again, a low, vibrating rumble rattling around inside his chest. Levi can feel it where they’re pressed together. His legs are shaking from holding himself up and he can feel how unspeakably hot Erwin’s cock is against his thigh.

God, he’s dizzy. He’s so dizzy, it’s too hot in here and Erwin is too -

“ _Oh_ , my _god_ -”

Erwin pushes them all in at once, slow but utterly unrelenting, and his fingers are so much bigger than Levi’s, _god_ , the little sounds Erwin’s making, god he just keeps _going_ , pushing deeper and deeper and Levi’s arm starts to shake where he’s bracing himself against Erwin’s chest. Erwin leaves them there for a few long, deliberate breaths, rubs their fingers together _inside_ Levi and it forces this - noise - out of Levi that makes him blush all the way to the back of his neck.

He pulls them back out and Levi rips his own hand back so he can wrap both arms desperately around Erwin’s neck, holding on for dear life.

Erwin makes a complaining sort of noise, and Levi shakes his head violently.

“Can’t -” He’s gasping. Oh. He can hardly breathe now. When had that happened?

“Can’t - handle that, can’t - _together, fuck_ , please, god, just - please put them back -“

Erwin does, god, of course he does, and Levi keeps himself upright until Erwin gets three fingers inside him and curls them so they’re _just_ shy of his prostate, infuriatingly close, and then his legs stop working.

They collapse under him and he falls heavily into Erwin’s lap, wet warm skin all pressed together, shower still miraculously hot next to them. Erwin wiggles his fingers a little inside Levi and it feels - playful, somehow - and Levi groans. Erwin kisses the side of his face, over and over until Levi gets the hint and turns to kiss him on the mouth.

Erwin eases his own fingers out again and it’s - it’s so easy it’s making Levi feel like his whole body is turning to liquid, he feels dizzy all the way to his bones, like he’s melting, and it’s so easy for Erwin to push his fingers into him now and _shit_ , who -

Someone’s gasping, moaning so high it makes Levi embarrassed just to hear it, someone’s speaking -

“- in me so - easy I don’t - I can’t _breathe_ , Erwin I can’t - please, please, god I - ”

It’s him. He’s whispering feverishly into Erwin’s ear, voice _high_ , like he’s whining and it sounds fucking _pornographic_ -

Erwin sinks three fingers back in and curls them perfectly and stays there, licks the clean warm water off the shell of Levi’s ear with an almost lazy air -

“Please, please please _please_ -”

Erwin huffs a noise at that, something overwhelmed and appreciative at once, and then he’s easing his fingers back out and guiding Levi up on shaking legs, running a slick hand over his own cock and biting his lip and Levi can’t take it, he can’t, he needs -

The first press of it is incomprehensible, too big, too hot -

He opens his mouth and moans, long and loud and Erwin’s cock twitches even as its still pushing into him.

“ _Erwin_.”

And god, if anyone were anywhere near their room, there’s no way they wouldn’t -

But Levi _wants_ them to hear, he wants them to know - Erwin’s - he’s -

He _loves_ him.

He actually _loves_ him.

Levi’s voice cracks when Erwin sinks all the way inside him. He can’t move, he can’t _breathe_ , he feels too full, like if he shifts even a little he’ll _die_ , Jesus Christ -

Very, very softly, Erwin’s ragged voice whispers, “Oh, my god, Levi.”

He doesn’t know what happens after that. His legs give out almost immediately and Erwin just wraps his arm around Levi’s waist and _bounces_ him on his cock like he weighs nothing, and he’s so deep and so warm and the angle is so perfect, and something lazy and hot builds at the base of Levi’s spine but Erwin’s in no rush to hurry it along, so Levi lays his head against Erwin’s shoulder and drools and moans and loses his entire sense of time, of reality, of everything.

He knows he’s babbling again, but his ears are ringing too loudly to really hear it, and the only thing in his entire world is the soft little gasps coming out of Erwin’s mouth and the pulse of his heartbeat in his cock.

He _loves_ him.

He hurts, his chest aches, he’s going to burst and he’s so warm and so full he can’t believe they’re here, they’re alive, they _made_ it and Erwin _loves_ him -

He comes completely untouched and without any warning whatsoever, stops his babbling and scrunches his toes up and curls his whole body into Erwin and shakes, vision going white at the edges, mouth open and silent against Erwin’s wet shoulder, and Erwin _still_ doesn’t change his pace, keeps fucking him unhurried and lazy, keeps holding him so tight it makes Levi short of breath, and so he just - keeps coming.

He doesn’t know how long it goes on, only that at the end he feels Erwin come with him, biting Levi’s shoulder hard enough to draw blood, and Levi makes an animal sort of noise, a wounded sort of noise, and collapses heavily into Erwin’s lap.

After a few minutes of panting against each other’s skin, Erwin turns off the water and murmurs something about wasting it softly into Levi’s hair. Neither of them move. Levi’s knees hurt; his feet are folded under him at an uncomfortable angle and his cracked ribs are aching so badly he can hardly breathe.

He hadn’t felt any of that until now. Erwin _had_ healed him, if only for a moment.

They stand slowly, stiffly, holding each other up and stumbling back to bed. Levi sleeps on top of the sheets - they’re disgusting, after all, and after all the effort they just went to to get clean - and Erwin sleeps on top of Levi. They’re careful of cracks and bruises, but they can’t let go of each other.

Levi doesn’t dream.

Hanji comes in in the morning with a sly smile and a stethoscope, and tells them that they’re not allowed to help with any of the lifting, but that they’re free to go.

Erwin catalogs and cleans all the guns with Sasha, and Levi cleans the rest of the camp. He barks something like an order at Armin, who clearly has never properly scrubbed a floor before, and Hope - Eren - laughs at him. Not the bloodthirsty, manic laugh from before. A real laugh.

They rebuild. It takes time. They heal, and they steal medicine and nails and food from any place that’s close.

All the people - chattering, buzzing, knocking genially into each other - raise Levi’s blood pressure, but they don’t leave. Not yet.

 

Months later, Levi goes into the woods. It’s been so long. He’s been afraid.

There’s a stretch of woods still inside the walls of the camp, thick and dark, and the rest of them have avoided it. The shadows are too long, the ground too soft and quiet. It reminds them of things that they don’t want to think about anymore.

Levi stands at the edge of the woods, watching the wall disappear into them. His hands are steady, as always, but his heart pounds.

A twig snaps behind him and he spins, on edge, pulled too tight with anxiety. He’d thought he was alone.

It’s Erwin.

“Listening?”

His voice is still a little hoarse. It always will be; there’s scar tissue in his windpipe.

But the sound of it warms Levi all the way down to the arches of his feet. Erwin’s here. He’s alive.

They’re alive.

Levi nods.

“What are they saying?”

Levi looks at him, startled. He’d never said anything about -

“What, the woods?”

“Mhm.”

Something shocks through his body, warm and slow. Erwin has always understood everything.

Levi looks back at the woods.

The sunlight comes through different here, filtered through the leaves softer and greener, a little cooler. There’s something so quiet about it, like it’s taking its time to touch the ground. Levi can see tiny bugs, little lingering floating seeds in the soft beams of light.

He breathes. The air is so clean, smells of cold water and wet bark, and the undefinable green smell of new leaves.

He remembers the dreams, the almost-whispers, the near supernatural feeling of anxiety he’d gotten from the woods. Like a warning.

They feel different now. So quiet. Safe.

_You’re safe._

Levi looks to his left at Erwin.

_What are they saying?_

“Let’s go find out.”

He takes a step into the woods, feels the cool shade and the wet bark smell envelop him like a blanket, and Erwin follows him. Of course he does.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had originally planned an epilogue for this story, but after i wrote it, it just didn't feel right. this felt like the end. i hope you guys are happy with it - i still might publish the epilogue separately, if anyone has any interest in a little one off about them in the future.  
> i loved writing this story; it took so much out of me but honestly meant a lot, and i really hope you guys liked it. thank you so much for sticking around and offering me so much encouragement, and being fucking awesome.  
> i included at least 3 anne carson quotes in this story so i thought it was only fitting to wrap up the final chapter summary with one as well. in case you couldn't tell, i cannot rec her poetry highly enough.  
> a huge, enormous, extra special thanks to @lostcauses, @seitsen-sarvi, and @ellabesmirched for being UNBELIEVABLY STELLAR HUMAN BEINGS and providing me with either accidental or on purpose guidance and insight. you are so amazingly talented, all of you. seriously i'm legit in awe.  
> 
> 
> speaking of awe, if you would all please direct your eye-holes to this piece of fucking stunning art[ right here](https://seitsen-sarvi.tumblr.com/post/177278460673/annihilation-1111-by-francisthegreat-thank-you#notes), which i commissioned from @seisen-sarvi and which literally made me weep tears of blood. this literally just ... sums up everything i feel about this story ending. god, thank you for doing such an amazing job.
> 
> lastly, i just wanted to tell you all i love you.  
> thanks <3


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